Musical Identity

The acappella blog has a regular feature of Dos & Don’ts which offers simple practical advice to performing groups. Occasionally, though, what looks on the surface like straightforward common sense turns out to have an interesting underside that is anything but straightforward. Mike Scalise's post on choosing gender-appropriate material for your group has had me thinking about it for the last two weeks.

At a practical level, the advice to choose music that fits the gender of your group is of course sensible. But two things interest me: the list of successful exceptions presented to nuance the argument, and the question of how we assign gender to songs in the first place.

There is something intractably fascinating about musical taste. At one level it’s just a personal thing – the musical equivalent of not being fond of celery – but somehow it also seems more important to us than that.

For instance, Chris Rowbury wrote back in June 2008 about how he doesn’t like a cappella (by which he meant the panoply of a cappella popular styles, rather than unaccompanied singing in general). And the late Steve Hall once told me that he liked pretty much all styles of singing except opera. Now, I happen to like both a cappella and opera, but I’m not going to get distracted into talking about why these particular musics are worth listening to – and indeed participating in – as these conversations usually get diverted into.

Instead, I want to think about how people experience these musical dislikes, and what they mean to them.

Put twenty choral practitioners in a room and ask them about vibrato and choral singing, and you will hear twenty different opinions. And if choral singers’ voices were as inflexible as these opinions can be, nobody would ever achieve a blended section. So I approach this question from a section leader in a barbershop chorus with some trepidation:

I have a Lead who has some vibrato in her voice. Do I put her in the middle of the section or is there some way I can help her to reduce this?

I sometimes feel a bit hypocritical when I skip breakfast.

You see, I go around telling anyone that will listen that just as breakfast is the most important meal of the day, the warm-up is the most important part of the choral rehearsal. It’s harder to say that with conviction if you’ve not eaten anything before noon.

So, we all know why breakfast is important. (If not - well you’re on the internet already, go and find out.) The reason I hold a parallel view of the warm-up is because - like breakfast - it might be a thing with one identifying label and be done at one specific time of day, but it is made up of a varied and flexible number of elements that simultaneously serve several purposes, both immediate and long-term.

Light has a funny dual nature: it is both particle and wave. I don’t fully understand how this is so, but I quite like the stretchy feeling my brain gets when I attempt to.

Music also has a dual nature. It is, on one hand, a static thing, as embodied in the written score; it holds still to be looked at and analysed. You can put it down and come back later and it’s still recognisably the same thing. You don’t even have to write it down for this to be true. Songs that you learn by ear have that same ability to exist as stable entities that keep the same form even if you don’t sing them for years.

On Wednesday I visited the newly-renamed Harmony InSpires chorus near Oxford for a coaching session. They are one of the many success stories of barbershop choruses transforming themselves through running Learn to Sing courses, having more than doubled their numbers since the start of the autumn. If they get many more members they’re going to need to find a bigger hall to rehearse in!

One thing I found fascinating, though, was that coming in as an outsider, I really couldn’t tell easily who were the new members and who had been singing with them for years unless someone told me explicitly one way or the other. Just observing the body language as they sang and the social interactions, there was an incredible sense of consistency and of belonging to the same social and musical world, even though more than half had only joined in the last few weeks.

So I have several hypotheses as to why this might be the case: