Learning

Celebrating the back-to-school season with two opportunities for barbershop arrangers:

The role of the audience in a musical performance is often imagined as a passive one. The composers and performers (and I guess the arrangers and impresarios and stage managers – all the people implicated in getting a performance to happen) assemble all the ingredients and cook them up into a musical repast that they then spoonfeed to the listeners, who just turn up and sit there.

There’s something to this idea of course – it takes more effort and attention to practise a piece of music up to performance standard than to purchase a concert ticket, and it makes a bigger difference if a performer loses concentration during a performance than if a listener does. So in that sense, the audience is the consumer of the musicians’ efforts.

Since writing earlier in the year about the effectiveness of duetting as a coaching and rehearsal tool, I’ve been reflecting again on why it works so well. One key point about it is that it’s not about the people who are singing – it’s the people who are listening who have the chance to grow. It offers people the opportunity to learn about the inner workings of the music they sing – how the parts around them interact – and also about the voices of their fellow singers – tone colour, vibrato, vowel shapes, expressive nuances.

But what is interesting is what the brain then goes on to do with all that information.

When I was about 12 I was flicking through the textbook we were using in our music class at school when I should have been doing something else, and found a diagram that looked a bit like this:

I think it was in a chapter about Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, though the thing that I found interesting was that it also described the shape of the Clementi sonatina I was learning at the time. I don’t recall what I was supposed to be learning in that lesson, but the revelation that you could represent an entire piece of music in a one-page picture continues to be useful to this day.

For many years now I’ve found the distinction that Lucy Green makes between ‘inherent’ and ‘delineated’ musical meanings a useful way to think about music. It’s a dialectic between meanings that are created in and by the musical materials themselves (and she draws significantly on Leonard Meyer, another favourite theorist of mine, for this) and meanings that are attributed to music by the culture in which it subsists.

As is often the case with dialectics, the pairing has a way of constantly deconstructing itself on one hand (you find you can access the inherent meanings except through cultural filters, so do the inherent meanings really exist?) whilst still remaining a robust and useful distinction to make. I wrote about this tendency many years ago in an article that engaged with the question of whether the social meanings we find in music are carried within the music itself or simply read into it.

Through years of teaching, I’ve also observed how this distinction provides a useful way to account for how people learn music. (Indeed, I note that Lucy Green is herself a music education specialist – and one of the few who has found a dedicated readership in ‘mainstream’ musicology and music theory.)

Prof. Peter JohnsonOn Wednesday lunchtime, Birmingham Consevatoire held a concert to celebrate the work of Professor Peter Johnson on the occasion of his retirement. As a long-time friend and colleague of Peter's, I was invited to say a few words and to have the privilege of presenting his leaving gift, volumes from Catalogue d’Oiseaux. Peter's work has had a profound impact on both my own research and my relationship with my own praxis over the years, so I thought it would be appropriate to make those public thanks even more public by posting them here.

I first heard of Peter when I was a postgraduate student, and some friends who were doing PhDs in the then very new area of performance studies came home from a conference bubbling over with excitement and talking about somebody called Peter Johnson who was ‘doing the most amazing things with tuning’. As first impressions go, I think he’d be okay with that. I then met Peter myself at various conferences during the 1990s and so when a lectureship came up here in 1999, it was the knowledge of his work that gave me the confidence that my own research could find a safe home here.

Peter’s most remarkable talent is for integration.

Last year, over on the Facebook group for Barbershop Arrangement and Composition, Jim Emery raised the following question:

I do actually have several arrangements that are OK but not stellar. One was performed in contest by my international competitor level quartet. Several others found their way to our quartet CD. But they seem kind of vanilla. Short of just "getting more creative", I'd love to exchange ideas for how to approach sprucing them up.

(Actually, while I’m at it I’ll make this implicit plug for the FB group more explicit. It’s not maybe as active as it might be, but it has some really good people involved in it, and has a wonderful range of experience, from relative beginners to some of the biggest names out there. If you’ve not been over there, do go check it out.)

Anyway, Jim’s was one of those questions that has stayed with me. He’s really put his finger on a particular dilemma: it’s all very well to recognise that you want your arrangements to be more creative, but how do you go about making that happen?

Back in 1996, when Highcliffe Junior Choir won the title of Sainsbury’s Youth Choir of the Year, I heard their founder-director Mary Denniss make a comment in an interview that has stayed with me ever since. She was asked if she ever had children join the choir who couldn’t sing in tune. ‘Well, yes, of course,’ she replied, ‘but they pick it up after a while.’

It wasn’t just that she was so pragmatic that struck me, it was the fact that she said it so kindly. It occurred to me that much of her success in turning ordinary school children into one of the country’s best choirs lay in this calm and confident trust in her singers’ ability to learn.