Musical Identity

Hey Big Spender!

I spent Saturday afternoon in London doing a bespoke workshop with the Barberfellas, an a cappella ensemble who all also sing with the Pink Singers choir. As their name implies, they specialise in close-harmony music, some of which is barbershop in the purists’ sense (you don’t get much more classic than arrangements by Ed Waesche), and some more stylistically varied, including some material arranged in-house.

My remit for the afternoon fell into two main areas: first a focus on building the classic barbershop ‘ring’ in the sound, and second some work on engaging the audience, both through stagecraft and generating musical expression and variety in performance.

My previous two posts on this theme considered the scenario of a young, skilled musician taking on the role of director for the first time with an established choir, and, respectively, the challenges they are likely to face, and the advantages they are likely to wield. This last post in the series looks a bit wider to the dangers the category ‘young and talented’ presents to those it is applied to in general, as well as how this plays out the specific scenario of the new director.

Talent, as I have discussed before, is a mythological category. Our culture largely regards it as an inborn, innate quality, an assumption for which the literature on expertise can find no basis. Depth of skill emerges from the quantity and quality of practise someone undertakes; capacity follows rather than precedes the activity.

But, because the mythology of talent is so ubiquitous, people still use it to describe the facts of aptitude that they observe. Henry Kingsbury describes how it thus becomes a socially-negotiated label: those with authority bestow it upon junior members of that social world, giving them permission to consider themselves as particularly and specially endowed. This label can then prove a useful motivator for continued engagement: a child who is led to believe they have a special capacity for something is arguably less likely to give it up.

There have been two incidents recently where the mass media portrayal of classical music has had scholars in those specific fields in a state that oscillates between outrage and despair. The first was the showing on BBC4 of Martin Jarvis’s film purporting that some of JS Bach’s works may have been written by his second wife, Anna Magdelena. The second was BBC2’s programme about the Monteverdi Vespers broadcast on Easter Saturday.

Having picked over some of the hurdles that face the sprightly new director when they take up their first post with an older choir in my last post, it occurred to me that there are also some advantages to this situation that it is worth pointing out. It may seem redundant to tell someone why they are fortunate to be both youthful and skilled, but when you are struggling against the twin obstacles of inexperience and condescension, it doesn’t necessarily feel as enviable as outsiders assume.

But there is a specific advantage that any new director has, and which is amplified significantly by both the qualities of relative youth and high skill. Your very existence bounces people out of their comfort zones.

There’s a scenario that happens frequently enough that it is possible to generalise about: a well-established choir acquiring a ‘young and talented’, but relatively inexperienced director. I put the ‘young and talented’ in scare quotes, as that’s how the director is usually described by the choir, but may not be how I would put it.

The dimension of youth is generally quite clear (though possibly not quite as purely objective as you might think - the perception of juniority can be magnified or diminished by other factors such as gender and class). But the concept of ‘talent’, as regular readers will know, is open to critique - it is a concept that mythologises the products of dedication as innate rather than hard-won.

So we all know that to be a good musician you need to be able to listen. The better directors can hear both the composite sound and the detail of what their ensembles produce, the more power they have to improve it. And the individual musicians within the ensemble need to be able to listen and respond to each other to achieve such desiderata as tuning, blend, balance, synchronisation - indeed, all the forms of interpersonal coordination we refer to collectively, if tautologically, as ‘ensemble’.

People care about the art of listening in other walks of life, too. Self-help books that promise to help your interpersonal skills tell you to pay attention to what other people say in conversation, not just spend the time you’re not talking planning what you’re going to say next.

And in specialist circumstances such as counselling and psychotherapy, it is central: not only does the therapist need to listen acutely to reach a diagnosis, the patient needs to feel listened to.

Last weekend brought a visit from mixed quartet MasterMix for a coaching session. I’ve worked with a few long-distance quartets in my time, but this one is raising the stakes rather in terms of logistics: not content with a journey between Derbyshire and Essex to sing together, they bring their bass in from Sweden. It seems appropriate, really, that their first two contests together will have been in Ireland (last autumn) and Spain (coming up in April).

Long-distance quartets typically have a skill profile in which the individual singers are operating initially at a higher level than the whole. They will often have considerable experience in other ensembles through which they have honed their skills, and are motivated to take on the extra travel to work together by the opportunity to sing with people who can bring this experience to the table. By the same token, their opportunities to learn how they are going to operate as a unit are relatively few compared to a local quartet, but commensurately more intensive. If they can only meet every few weeks, they make a proper weekend of it.

I have written before about Impostor Syndrome, and how the whole ‘maestro myth’ can exacerbate it for conductors. A recent mentoring session revealed some interesting relationships between this aspect of musical identity as it shapes in our internal narratives of self and as it manifests in the physical actions we use to direct our choruses.

At the start of the session, it looked like a reasonably routine bit of work on technique in terms of calming down the amount of movement the director was using. It is a change a lot of us need to make in our earlier years as a director, and indeed, it can remain a central issue for many of us even as we get more experienced. I have a lot of sympathy for people with this technical flaw, as it is one I have had to work on a lot myself!