Excellence

Tone Bianca DahlOne of the sessions at the ABCD Convention at the end of August was workshop on communication between choir, conductor and audience led by Tone Bianca Dahl. Tone teaches choral conducting at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and her book on this subject has recently been translated into English. Her central question in the presentation was: what creates the magic?; and can we create it at will?

There has been an interesting thread of discussions over on Choralnet recently in response to another blogger’s claim that the Ambassadors of Harmony set ‘a new standard in choral music’ in their performance at this year’s International barbershop convention. The responses range from the enthusiastic to the disdainful, with some interesting variants in each camp – a wonderful example, indeed, of the way that aesthetic values are not static, but culturally negotiated on an ongoing basis.

Lying behind some of the comments are a set of cultural tensions that have existed in music for at least a couple of centuries if not more.

One of the foundational concepts in Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is the distinction between production and production capacity.* Production is getting stuff done – generating whatever outputs a particular role is required to turn out. Production capacity is building the wherewithal to do this effectively – it doesn’t make the outputs itself, but it puts you in a better position to make them. This turns out to be a very useful distinction to help both devise individual rehearsal plans and long-term plans for a choir’s development.

Early years educationalists consider there to be no difference between learning and play for toddlers. I sometimes wonder if there should be for grown-ups.

In higher education we spend a significant amount of time thinking about and developing specifications for the courses we teach. We are encouraged to do this not so much in terms of content (what are we trying to teach our students?), but in terms of aims (what do we want our students to end up being able to do?). Once we have defined our learning outcomes, that then drives things like delivery and assessment.

This is all to the good; it is rational and sensible way of going about designing courses. But it can rather give us the idea that what goes on in the modules that make up our programmes will somehow produce an adequately educated student at the end of the process. I suspect this is a delusion: my hunch is that the formally-articulated part of education is only half the story, and that it won’t work unless there is a healthy dollop of play involved too.

Old SchoolOne of the highlights of the BABS Convention in Llandudno last weekend was the masterclass by International bronze quartet medallists, Old School. This is a quartet made up of singers who have been highly successful in previous quartets - I lose count of how many previous medals they have collected between them over the last twenty years. Their current mission is not merely to be successful in contest, however, but to be successful in contest with really traditional barbershop songs and arrangements. And it would be hard to find four voices better suited to remind the world of the sheer sonic pleasure available from this kind of purist approach.

There were two particular things from the masterclass that I put by for later mulling-over:

I spent last weekend at the British Association of Barbershop Singers annual Convention, which this year was held in Llandudno. It was a rich and stimulating weekend with much both to learn from and to warm the heart – both musically and socially. And the setting was gorgeous – it would be easy to have a very pleasant weekend there even without a couple of thousand of your friends to sing with!

I came out of the quartet semi-finals on Friday night with some interesting observations about the relationship between stage presence and vocal resonance.

The cliché goes: Amateurs practice until they get it right; professional practice until they can’t get it wrong.

This is probably quite a good generalisation. What I find interesting is that I usually hear it from amateurs who have completely misinterpreted it. It is trotted out in support of a rehearsal strategy that involves endless drill and the desire to be able to ‘do it the same every time’.

Now, I’m not knocking reliability in performance. It’s good to know that you can produce the goods in front of an audience without screwing up. I’m just questioning (a) whether drill is the best strategy to achieve it and (b) whether it is the best use of rehearsal time. After all, as Kaplan points out, the goal of rehearsal is to change things, not to make them the same.

One of the dilemmas that both performers and music educators face is how to manage the balance between practice/rehearsal that facilitates artistic or technical growth and practice/rehearsal that makes a performance more suitable for public consumption. They are both essential for the development of the musician, but they are actively in conflict – you can’t do both at the same time.