November 2010

I recently had an interesting conversation with my friend Sarra about different approaches to sight-singing – how some people think more in terms of key and others in terms of the intervals between notes. It turns out that we both use some of both, though possibly with rather different emphasis. I commented on how I am always surprised when I see how much of an emphasis some really quite distinguished colleagues in the choral profession seem to place on thinking in intervals in rehearsal and audition compared to thinking in keys.

Later that day, Sarra sent me an email in which she had these further thoughts:

I mentioned in my post about last week's Arrangers’ Workshop that we’d talked about the relationship between the circle of fifths and the sense of a song’s form, and that it probably needed a post in its own right to cover. So, here is that post.

I’ve written before about Harmonic Charge as a measure of the inherent energy a chord has within the context of a particular key. Here, we’re just talking about dimension of harmonic charge that involves the potential energy of distance round the circle of fifths. The other dimensions (major/minor and presence/absence of a tritone) seem to me more about flavour than structure – important considerations for a song’s expressive feel, but perhaps secondary when thinking about mapping out its shape.

So, the point about the circle of fifths is that it is measure of tonal distance. Chord III is further away from ‘home’ than chord V (as it is V of VI, which is V of II, which is V of V, and then you’re nearly home). So, chords further out round the circle inherently feel more active, as you’re going to have travel further harmonically to get back home to where the music feels at rest.

Over on From the Front of the Choir a couple of years back, Chris Rowbury posted a thought-provoking piece on the theme that competitions are for losers (i.e. that, by definition, the majority of people who participate can’t win). He identifies two particular problems with the idea of competition in the arts. First, that they encourage extrinsic rather than intrinsic values – doing things for external rewards rather than their inherent worth – and are therefore artistically shallow. Second, this makes them psychologically disempowering, as participants are handing over their sense of self-worth to somebody else’s judgement.

These are both compelling arguments in my view, and articulate well why many of us in the arts experience a degree of discomfort about competitive events. On the other hand, contest is rife in all walks of musical life: from the institutionalised systems of brass bands and barbershop, to the local festival circuit, to the annual cycle of competitions and prizes in conservatoires, and their grown-up analogues in Cardiff and Leeds. Competition may be problematic for musicians, but it also clearly offers something that is valued widely enough to make contest a normal rather than aberrational behaviour.

I have a lot of conversations with choir directors, and one of the things I’ve noticed is that there is a strong correlation between how happy or unhappy the director is with progress and how much they refer to the choir as ‘we’ or ‘they’. Choral leaders face myriad potential difficulties: do the singers turn up regularly and on time?; do they retain what they’ve learned one week to the next?; do they pay attention during rehearsal?; do they watch the conductor?

Every choir faces variants of these challenges at their own particular level. But directors seem to feel more frustrated about them if they are framing them as problems with the behaviour of the (implicitly errant) singers rather than problems with the culture of the choir as a whole, including the director.