March 2010

Retention is the Achilles heel of a performance coach. It’s one thing to go and help an ensemble significantly improve their performance, but unless the coaching results in some kind of longer-lasting improvement, it has not done its job. It may of course have given the singers a good time, so was still a valid use of the session - but there is a difference between a fun workshop and coaching.

There are a number of elements or stages to the process of retention, and I suspect that the secret lies in combining them effectively.

One of the main interpretive challenges to face classical musicians is the ambiguity of notation. The dots on the page are very informative about what to play, but mostly leave us guessing about how. What looks like the ‘same’ notation will carry different expectations for performance style at different points in history and in different places. Formal training teaches the typical answers to these questions, and advanced training provides the research skills to seek out mores specific answers for particular repertories.

Of course, even armed with all the available information – about historical instruments, and the techniques used to play them, about the treatises on performance or aesthetics – the musician still has the imaginative task of converting that into real sounds. An interpretation thus represents a statement of how the performer concludes the music should go.

Now, for people working with popular repertories of the last 50 years or so, the task is very different, since the definitive text is now no longer on paper, but a recording.

One of the minor peculiarities of barbershop culture (as opposed to its various major peculiarities) is the way it uses the word ‘theme’. Generally, if you ask someone what a song’s theme is, they’ll either give a poetic or literary response – love, loss, nostalgia, that kind of thing – or point to the primary identifying melodic idea as you would to identify themes in a Beethoven symphony. But what barbershop judges (well, specifically Music and Presentation judges) mean when they say ‘theme’ is the primary musical element in that particular arrangement.

Now, this can be quite a useful question to ask. The term is odd, but the concept is serviceable. One of the main differences between a performance that sounds like people just obediently singing the notes and words and one that carries musical meaning is a clear sense of what the song’s main musical strength is. What a song is primarily ‘about’ does not always lie in the lyrics: if the thing that stays with you days later is the shape of the melody or the groove of the rhythm, then that should be your starting-point for interpretive decisions.

The thing about a song’s theme, then, is that it can stand alone. The main test for if a song has a lyric theme is if it makes sense to print the words on a tea-towel.

I spent last weekend in North London at the National Youth Choir’s training event for Young Leaders. In anticipation of the courses they will be running around the country this Easter, the weekend’s purpose was to support those making the transition from choir members to staff. There was a real sense of continuum between the more senior staff members providing the training (most of whom had themselves come through the choir to their current responsibilities), through staff members with some experience and those just starting out, to current choir members exploring the possibility of joining the staff in the future.