Musical Identity

I have recently been reading Thomas Turino's book Music in Social Life - which is much to be recommended as a pretty much optimal balance between intelligence and accessibility, by the way. You can tell he is both an experienced researcher and has spent lots of time framing concepts so as to make sense to non-specialist undergraduates.

One of the things I have been finding quite striking about it is the way he uses Peircean semiotics. I'm aware, by the way, that this post is going to get rather niche for a few paragraphs, but it might open out again into more generalist territory towards the end. We'll see.

I usually describe my own musicological interests in terms of being about 'music and its social meanings', which encompasses both my PhD on music and gender in historical repertories and my increasingly ethnomusicological trajectory through my two books. But right at the start of this interest lies an undergraduate dissertation on music and semiotics, that in many ways underpins everything I've done since, but which rarely shows its theoretical colours directly in what I write.

Floddy the Hippo of Belonging: sorry about the camera-shake - it must have been an emotional moment...Fourth post in a series that starts here

After physical survival and safety, our next most primal needs are social. We need to feel connected to others, to feel like we belong.

Fortunately, choirs are good for this. Indeed, the two main reasons people join choirs are (a) 'I'd like to sing, and I might make some friends, and (b) 'I'd like to make some new friends, and it might be fun to sing'. So, we can feel good about what we offer our members on this one.

Having said that, it is possible to feel isolated in a choir. Sometimes new members feel like everyone already knows each other, and it's hard to find a conversation. Choral seating arrangements that keep everyone in rows inhibit you from interacting with each other. (Logistically there may be good reasons for this - the bigger the choir the more urgent are the issues of crowd control after all - but it still has an impact on belonging needs.) Sometimes the people addressing the choir (primarily the director, but also others making announcements) use cultural references that make you feel excluded.

The recent kerfuffle about conducting and sexism, along with some thought-provoking posts over on the Thoughtful Gestures blog, have reminded me of some thoughts I put together for a lecture last year at a girls' school entitled 'Where Have All the Women Gone?' Having revisited my notes I find there's actually more I might want to write about here than I remembered, but for today I'll stick with Prototype Theory.

This is an idea first developed by psychologist Eleanor Rosch in 1973 to explain one of the fundamental ways we organise our perception of the world into categories. And in each over-arching category, there will be some examples that seem more typical of that category than others. One of her early studies found that there was a considerable consensus that, while hat stands might logically belong to the category of 'furniture' people would think of tables or chairs much more readily as representative of the class.

Like others who blog, I was very torn about whether to comment on the recently-reported comments of Jorma Panula about female conductors. As one friend put it, 'Oh for God's sake. Why do the press even give these dinosaurs the publicity?' There is this fond hope that eventually we will outlive everyone who hangs onto these views and the world will be a more benign place, and in the meantime the kindest thing to do is just ignore them.

But the comments thread that ensued after the Artsjournal article suggests that this fond hope is but a delusion. I have a hunch that women of the 1930s were saying similar things about ageing Victorian relics even as misogyny was on the rise once again. So, sorry folks, but we're going to have to take a look at this. Not at Panula, who, frankly comes over as a caricature of himself, but at the arguments that emerged in the responses on the artsjournal report.

I don't know quite why I started thinking in Freudian terms recently about arranging. I am sceptical in all kind of ways about Freud's theories - so many of them are so phallocentric, after all, which may feel normal for men, but just looks weird from a female perspective. But there are also ways in which he was quite humane and you can't accuse him of having not spent enough time thinking about this stuff.

Anyway, the experience that brought all this to mind was the stage of arranging I think of as 'combing' - getting all the lines lying smoothly so there aren't any tangles in the music to bump the listener, or knots in the lines to impede the singers. And I got to reflecting on how I know when an arrangement is finished.

One small bit of unfinished business from my first post on this subject last month is the question from the director I quoted of whether it is harder to get people to volunteer in a small chorus. It seems like a good question, and my initial hunch is: not necessarily, but there could be some kind of link between choir size and development of infrastructure.

So, first, why 'not necessarily'. Just because your choir is small doesn't mean that the people in it are any less intelligent or willing or up-for-it. Yes, there will be fewer people to do the jobs, but many of the jobs are commensurately smaller, so there is no logical reason why you shouldn't find enough people to get everything done. Indeed, quartets seem to manage all their logistics, music acquisition, coaching needs, publicity and finance with only four of them. Numbers aren't an inherent defining factor here.

In the first two posts in this series, we looked at the problem of ageing choirs (or indeed voluntary organisations in general) and how their difficulties recruiting the next generation of members can be analysed in terms of the routinisation of charisma. We've got to the point of addressing what we can actually do about this.

I should possibly add at this point (maybe I should have done earlier!) that whilst I'm writing these posts in largely theoretical terms, I am mentally testing them out on a whole bunch of real-life case-studies as I go. But I'm not citing these very much, except the odd anonymised anecdote, because I don't think it is the kind of thing where commenting publicly would be kind to the groups involved. We all know groups to whom these comments could apply to a greater or lesser extent - it's not going to help them overcome their challenges to point the finger at them.

More helpful, I hope, are the following points.

Bradley & Pibram's diagram: the dynamics of a charismatic group

In my last post I started the process analysing the problems faced by ageing choirs in terms of the routinization of charisma. If you missed it, the back-story is only a click away; I'll wait here for you to see where we'd got to so far.

All caught up? Right, we were about to look at the group dynamic of a once-charismatic organisation that had settled into a happy and successful mode of operation. For this we are going to revisit Bradley and Pibram's diagram of the relationship between two key elements of a charismatic group: control and flux.

Flux (originally theorised as 'communion') is that sense of euphoric inter-connection where individuals merge their identities into the group. It is generated by certain specific forms of relationship within the group, characterised by each member having access to every other member without exclusionary sub-groups or cliques. Control (originally described as 'power') is the top-down authority that keeps the emotional energy thus generated in check.