Performing

Last time I looked at this subject, I was considering the vocal issues that need addressing to smooth out a choppy line – namely continuity of airflow and getting the vowels in line. But I’ve also been thinking that an overly wordy delivery is also a symptom of an overly wordy way of thinking about music.

Maybe I should put that more positively. When you see a performance that you could criticise as choppy or over-articulated, you can usually also congratulate it for its energetic commitment to the message in the lyric. You never doubt that the singers know what the song means, and you can tell very clearly which bits they like best. They have nailed comprehensibility and communication – though seemingly at the expense of choral tone.

I’ve been thinking about tempo a lot recently in performances I’ve been listening to, and how we develop perceptions about what is the ‘right’ tempo for a piece. It’s one of those interesting questions because there are no absolute right answers, but as listeners we still have a pretty reliable sense of when a particular choice feels appropriate.

So, to state the obvious: most pieces of music have a range of speeds at which they will work well. The metronome looked like a major advance for composer control-freakery, but even with pieces that have precise speeds specified in the text, there are still musically plausible performances possible at faster and slower speeds.

Several times over the last few months, I’ve found myself helping singers overcome a tendency to chew their words as they enunciate them. So I’ve been thinking not only about techniques to help smooth the lines out, but also what underlies the habit in the first place. Over-articulation is an endearing feature of Nick Park animations, after all, but less helpful in choral contexts.

One origin of the habit, I suspect, is the way that the practices of the British cathedral tradition infiltrate so widely into the rest of our musical life. And while there is much that is wonderful about that, not all its habits necessarily translate directly into other contexts. The statement ‘You can never have too much consonant!’ is a valid statement when you’re working in an acoustic that is better for atmospheric effects than intelligibility of text, but in a small, dry room produces a result that is rather over-mannered.

But this is not the whole story, of course.

As an addendum to my post on word sounds from a couple of months back, I had a lovely little light-bulb moment from John Grant when working with him with Heartbeat Chorus last week. It was about the vowel ‘Oo’.

Now, I have observed over the years that Oos can sound a bit muted compared to other vowels. This is sometimes an advantage of course: as an arranger you can manipulate both relative loudness of different parts and overall dynamic shape of an arrangement by your choice of neutral vowels. But it can also be a problem, reducing the sense of projection.

Raymond Warren, who was Professor of Music at Bristol when I studied there used to talk of the way that Brahms so easily falls into what he called the ‘moderato trap’. Fast movements aren’t so very fast, slow movements aren’t so very slow, and there’s not much room between for the tempi of what should be of a genuinely moderate speed. I’ve been noticing a similar effect in a number of the groups I’ve been working with lately.

I’ve had several conversations with choir directors over the years about the experience of coming off stage from a performance and having your singers ask you how the performance went. Apparently I’m not alone in finding this a slightly baffling question.

The immediate response is, ‘Well you were there too – what do you think?’ It feels odd to be asked to pass judgement on an experience that the questioner was also participating in. But from the singer’s perspective, of course, it makes perfect sense to ask, since their routine experience in rehearsal is to look to their director for feedback on how they’re doing.

So there’s an interesting difference here between the director’s state of mind in rehearsal and in performance. In rehearsal, you’re using your analytical, or diagnostic ears. The task is not just to perceive what’s going on within the ensemble, but also to articulate it.

In performance, though, this feedback function transmutes into a role that’s much more about regulating than reflecting.

There is a certain type of song that has offers a specific type of trap to the performer. These are songs in which the lyric makes an explicit commitment to a certain expressive quality or type of characterisation in such a way that really draws attention to itself if the performers’ musical rendition doesn’t quite achieve it.

The classic example is ‘I Got Rhythm’. If you don’t got rhythm, it shows. Similarly, if you ain’t got that swing, your performance of Duke Ellington’s classic is unlikely to be meaningful. Indeed, any song whose lyric describes one of its constituent musical elements is simultaneously telling the performers how they should sing it and telling an audience the criteria by which they should judge that performance.

When someone smiles, you always know immediately whether they really mean it or whether they’re just going through the motions to be polite. The actual position of the facial muscles is very similar, but humans are expert at reading each others’ emotional states from subtle clues, and find the distinction unmistakable. Nonverbal communications studies calls this smile that you know is felt the ‘duchenne smile’.

I’ve been thinking about this quality in choral performances I’ve seen recently. Sometimes a choir can give the impression of just being obedient: singing the notes and words required by their music in the manner required by their conductor. Other times, you get a sense that they are really living the music, that they are experiencing the performance as a meaningful act of communication. And I’m interested in what goes into making one of the latter ‘duchenne’ performances.