On Finding the Layers in Our Music: Part 1

I had an interesting question by email recently from a barbershop director about how to go about deepening her chorus’s interpretation of a song. It came out of some feedback from Convention judges, who had considered their interpretation to be somewhat simplistic at times, and advising them to develop it by exploring the song’s layers. The director was finding it hard to know exactly what to do in response, saying:

As a song we'd sung for so long, we'd got to a point where we were all confident in our own interp, so I'm not sure any of us will have any new ideas as we felt our interp was appropriate. Yes we can get a coach into work on it and breathe new life into it, but I do worry that will simply upset the chorus that we have a version we like.

This reflection helped her zone into her central dilemma:

So my question is - apart from taking a break and starting again from scratch, if you have a song you enjoy singing, 1) how do you find those 'additional layers', and 2) how do you do it without destroying the confidence of the chorus and the pleasure of performing the song?

It’s a good question isn’t it? And one that applies to all performing musicians, across genres. My immediate thoughts when I read it went to some pieces I have been working on at the piano for the last two years, and realising that while my primary labours have been over the technical challenges of playing them, in the process my musical understanding has also deepened. Indeed, I’m not sure I could have stayed interested in them for the amount of time it has taken to develop my technique had it not done so. So, what was going on to make that happen?

I think one of the things that makes this a slippery kind of topic to discuss is the dual sense of the word ‘interpretation’, which I reflected on back in the days when I was still teaching Musical Philosophies and Aesthetics. Feedback on your interpretation is making judgements about your understanding of a piece of music based on the perception of the concrete sounds you produce in performing it. Which end of the equation needs developing, our imaginative concept of it, or our technical skills in bringing it to life?

The answer is usually, to an extent, both: your physical skills can only work with what your imagination has to offer, but it is also quite possible for your inner musical life to be richer and more vivid than your technical skills are able to replicate. One of my critiques of barbershop’s erstwhile Presentation Category was the way that it sometimes adduced a paucity of feeling when what was really on display was just rather basic skills. People bring their whole hearts to their performances even when their execution lacks control.

On the other hand, it is definitely the case that developing your concept of a piece of music will make a difference to how you perform it, even without necessarily making a conscious decision to change your delivery. I know this to be true because it was the hypothesis that Victoria Vaughan tested in her PhD, so whatever level your technical skills are currently at, thinking in greater depth about the music will get more musical-communicative mileage out of those skills.

As to the worry about a group already being quite happy with their interpretation, I suspect that the process of increasing the depth and nuance will rarely make major changes to the overall delivery of the performance. Choices about tempo, pacing and dynamic outline are pretty fundamental and generally the earliest parts of the structure to be put in place. Developing the interpretation is more likely to be a matter of adding colour and shading to bring the ideas into relief than of changing its shape. You might experiment with a different tempo or groove as a way to get a fresh insight into a piece, but it’s relatively rare that such experiments make a radical difference to your approach.

This is all useful groundwork to understand the nature of the question, but it doesn’t actually get onto what you actually do to make it happen. But this is quite long enough for one post, so the nitty-gritty can wait for next time.