Performing

Cheshire Chord Co in their winning performance

In many ways this last weekend was very typical for the one that takes October into November. It is the standard time of year for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers to hold their annual convention, and it was back in one of their frequently-used convention venues, the Harrogate International Centre. But there was one strange thing for me: it was the first LABBS convention since 1997 at which I didn’t spend a day or more behind the judges’ table.

There were obvious ways in which I noticed the difference. I had more time to hang out and chat to friends (and also to have conversations relevant to my new role in LABBS looking after director education.) I could pop out during the day for a breath of fresh air. I could do some coaching - of which more in my next post.

I am recently back from a trip to the Edinburgh Festivals, which offer what may be the richest, most varied and most genuinely international collection of common cold viruses in the world. Coming home with ‘festival flu’ is, apparently, all part of the experience. In five days we went to 15 events and 2 exhibitions; some were professional, some amateur; some charged for entry, others didn’t (interestingly, this is not quite the same division as pro/am); and covering comedy, music, theatre, visual arts and cultural commentary. I also came home with incipient artistic indigestion.

I’ll have some specific thoughts to tease out in response to some of these events (and/or in response to the peculiar juxtaposition of some of these events) in future posts. But in the first instance, I’d like to mull on some general points about the nature of the Fringe Festival in particular, and the effect it has on both the performers involved and the performances they produce.

One of the interesting features of the barbershop tradition is its approach to the delivery of ballads, described various as freely, rubato, ad lib, conversational, or - most circularly, but in the context of the style, most accurately - balladized. I wrote about this in Chapter 6 of my book about barbershop, which discusses variations in approach over the history of the style, and the various ways that insiders and outsiders understand the treatment.

I would say, indeed, that there has been a certain amount of change in the general performance style in the twelve years since I was first writing that chapter, but it probably won’t be clear how much change until we are looking back on today from a vantage point in the future. It’s hard to pick out the signal from the noise when you are living through what will eventually become history.

There has been some interesting research over the years about barbershop and constructions of masculinity. Richard Mook, in particular, has investigated the discourses in both golden-age (i.e. early 20th-century) and contemporary barbershop ensembles and shown how they configure the harmonic experience of expanded sound in terms of homosocial bonding.

This is possibly why you can get a room full of barbershop judges watching a video of the Gas House Gang's of 'Bright Was the Night', and the men are raving about what an amazing experience it is, musically and emotionally, while the women are saying, 'Yes but it's just chord-worship, isn't it? It's all about them; they're not really interested in the woman they're ostensibly singing about, are they?'. And both, in their way, are right. It is an amazing performance, but it is more about lock and ring as symbol and enactment of the bond between singers than about the content of the lyrics. And the comments posted on youtube about it are telling in this context - the verbal equivalent of punching the air and shouting 'yeah'.

Gratuitous paradise pic: taken on the way to the supermarket...I recently had a rather wonderful trip back to the island of Bermuda, where my mother grew up and where we still have family. It was intended to be a break from my usual obsessions, but you know how it is - sometimes ideas insist on presenting themselves to your brain even when you’ve put yourself off-duty. To my credit, I didn’t have very many thoughts out there.

But I did spend quite a lot of time thinking about accents. I love the Bermudian accent - not especially for any inherent beauty of sound, but simply because it is the sound of childhood holidays and family closeness. If you met my mother you’d probably think she sounded quite English - and more so, the more formal the circumstance - but even 60 years after moving to the UK, she will revert to a Bermudian accent within the family for certain expressive registers.

(Thus, it was weirdly comforting to do things like going to the supermarket in Bermuda: it was just a shop full of strangers like any grocery store, but sonically it felt like being en famille.)

This article first appeared on Tom Metzger’s blog Owning The Stage back in January 2009. I am republishing it here because that site is currently offline - temporarily I hope, but in the meantime I’ll put this here so I can refer back to it, as I do periodically. I have left in the references to several of Tom’s posts as it was the dialogue between the two blogs that led this one to be written; should Owning The Stage come back on line, I’ll come back and add the appropriate links!

A ‘flow’ state is one where you are completely immersed in an activity, losing all sense of self-consciousness, with action and awareness completely merged. It’s what athletes mean when they say they are ‘in the zone’. We should care about it because it relates both to high levels of personal satisfaction in what we do and to the development of high-level skills. Happiness and expertise go hand in hand, it seems.

On the same day I was having my revelations about feeling under the artistic thumb of over-interfering editors, a colleague/friend posted this on his Facebook timeline:

How can I put this without seeming unkind?. Putting aside my own paltry efforts in this field it was my misfortune to attend the worst piano recital today I've heard in 55 or so years of concert going; playing which would make Cherkassky and Pogorelich seem models of pianistic rectitude. Half a dozen or so (lost count) Chopin Nocturnes followed by Prokofiev's mighty 8th Sonata - a consummate display of pianistic and musical incompetence, the id always to the fore, the music merely a vehicle for a display of a grotesque psychotic disorder. Inner voices ('look how smart I am') which go nowhere except up cul-de-sacs, a musical narrative nowhere to be seen or understood; special 'effects' by the bucket load. And all accompanied by penetrating glances into the audience just to check how 'appreciative' we were of his extraordinary individuality.

It struck me that this is about as clear an argument as I’ve ever seen against the concept of ‘artistic freedom’.

I recently learned the word 'repurpose' on one of those lists of mildly useful household tips that circulate round the internet. (They always make of me think of the Viz example: 'A cigar case full of angry wasps makes an inexpensive vibrator'.) It has a more thoughtful and less jerry-rigged feel to it than 'hack' (as in 'life-hack' or the more specific IKEA-hack*), and so I'm happy to use it to describe the manner in which I have appropriated an idea.

The concept is one shared by Karen O'Connor in her Performing on Your Mind workshop back in November, called 'parking'. It is a technique for sequestering anxieties, especially those outside your circle of influence. If something bothers you, but is completely beyond your control, then once you have figured out there is nothing you can do that will make a difference there is nothing to be gained by giving it any further attention.