:: News & Comment

Vocal Authority lives!

October 12th, 2011

I’ve begun the process of updating the web version of the Biographical List of Tenors in my tenor history book, and have been reading Ian Bostridge’s A Singer’s Notebook. It was quite a shock to discover that it reprints IB’s ancient critique of Vocal Authority. The review sounded pretty patronising first time round back in 1998, and it hasn’t improved with age. He doesn’t really get it and gets all sorts of things wrong – and he certainly doesn’t like it.

V A was my first book. It was based on my PhD thesis, and like many first books it’s very much of its time (as is Bostridge’s review). It still figures on university reading lists, especially in the USA, and I sometimes get asked if I would write the same book today. The answer is ‘no’ (often to the dismay of the enquirer). I’ve come close to attempting a successor, but disillusionment with academia set in a while ago and the History of Singing that Neil Sorrell and I have just finished is definitely my last foray into anything remotely academic. I suspect poor IB won’t like that either, should he happen to stumble across it, but he can take comfort from the fact that it’s my last in this particular genre.

But having said all that, I have been touched by the reception Vocal Authority had (and still gets) in certain quarters. Converting the thesis into a book was a long and frustrating process. In the thesis I put the theory chapter last as it was generated by the main body of material and I didn’t want readers to be distracted by my Gramscian analysis if they weren’t that way inclined. At my viva the examiners asked me to move the theory to the front (in keeping with more usual academic practice). This was in the days when cutting and pasting meant literally that, and it took forever to make the change. Then having finally done it, I collected the copies from the binders on my way back from a gig, fell asleep on the tube and woke up to find my bag had been nicked. Poor thief – three copies of Vocal Authority, my concert gear and the previous day’s shirt and underwear. The upside was that my examiners – having eventually taken delivery of a second set of copies – kindly said they thought it publishable and suggested I sent the thesis to CUP, who liked it but said they’d much rather the theory chapter was at the back…

It was worth the agony though. Being a performer can be a humbling experience – people being moved by what you do – but performances die even as they’re born, so their effect is confined to the moment (or the immediate memory). Writing on the other hand stays with you, right or wrong. The Cambridge UL copy of VA has been somewhat cynically (and definitely illegally) annotated in pencil by a reader of the Bostridge persuasion who thinks it’s complete rubbish, and you expect disagreement (better that than readers falling asleep). But the compensation when someone tells you that you’ve changed their life is quite something. It’s happened to me on a number of occasions in different parts of the world with Vocal Authority (not with anything else I’ve written, sadly). I wrote it to try to explain the world of singing as I saw it then, but it clearly touched a nerve with many singers. There won’t be many bookshelves where it sits side by side with A Singer’s Notebook but both books have in common a singer’s musings on aspects of history and the sometimes rather unworldly profession that we inhabit, and the fact that we can have such differing perspectives is not such a bad thing.

Posted in history of singing, Tenors, Vocal Authority | 2 Comments »

RECORDINGS

October 8th, 2011

Red Byrd

NMC has released a CD of Thea Musgrave’s Wild Winter, which she composed for us in 1993. The recording is taken from the Radio 3 broadcast of the first performance in Lichfield Cathedral in the 1993 Lichfield Festival. I’d almost forgotten all about it, and was surprised by how energised it sounds. The other singers in addition to me and Richard Wistreich are a very lively Ian Honeyman (currently doing a charity walk the length of the country singing for his supper) and Canadian soprano Suzie LeBlanc. We’re accompanied by the supremely elegant Fretwork (including the much missed Richard Campbell, whose memorial service is at St Martin in the Fields on November 28^th). The title of the album is An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge NMC D167.

The Sound and the Fury

…have just finished recording the complete works of Firminus Caron. We already have one Caron CD out, and it’s rumoured that the complete set of masses and chansons will be out before the end of the year. Next year we’ll be re-recording Ockeghem’s Prolationum mass and several versions of the Cuius Vis Toni.

Cantum Puchriorum Invenire

The first recording of this research programme is about to happen, and we hope the release will coincide with the first live outing of the programme in next year’s York Early Music Festival, which will be in the Harewood House church, featuring a newly commissioned video from Michael Lynch. Chris O’Gorman and I have been rehearsing from beautiful facsimiles of the Florence manuscript, and we’re about to find out if our de-rhythmicised efforts actually work.

Dowland Project

We hope the CD will appear early in the new year, but we’re still waiting for a date from ECM.

…and the History of Singing

…is finally done, with the page proofs back with Cambridge University Press. When the book appears (January if we stick to the schedule) I’ll make a dedicated page on this site linking aspects of the book with some of my recordings and concert projects. The Cambridge History of Musical Performance (to which I contributed a chapter on the long 18th century) is due in February, with the Cambridge History of Medieval Music (my chapter is on modern performance thereof) following later in the year. That’s an awful lot of academic stuff for a lapsed academic – it must be time to write a novel…

Posted in Cantum pulcriorum invenire, Dowland Project, Sound & Fury | No Comments »

The Limits of Musicology

September 26th, 2011

Having just proof-read my two Cambridge Music History chapters (both should be published next year) and being in the middle of proof-reading the History of Singing I’m more than usually conscious of whether or not I practice what I preach. All of my historical writing is generated as far as possible by the actuality of performance – in a nutshell what singers might actually have sung rather than what composers or theorists may have written (or expected, or hoped for…), a historical perspective rather than a musicological one. It’s not always easy to incorporate elements of historical practice: the early music movement is very selective in what it chooses to recover from the past, and there are entire institutions dedicated to perpetuating a new and improved version of history.

Much of the time modern singers are at the mercy of conductors, directors of one sort or another, or simply the ideology of modern performance. The latter has its roots way back in the 20^th century, when the composer’s word finally became law. Within the early music movement, despite welcome moves to the contrary in some quarters, there’s still a view that even the 15^th or 16^th century composer was the fount of all inspiration and that a musicologist who works on the surviving manuscripts is his representative here on earth. Unfortunately, many musicologists tend to privilege musical theory rather than performance practice, the rules rather than their application, and in their wish to preserve the integrity of the composer too often resort to what the text books of the time prescribe rather than the less tidy but more creative flights of fancy that the singers might have enjoyed. You wouldn’t try to reconstruct Impressionism from art teaching manuals of the period – you’d end up with view of what the teachers might have wanted rather than what their wayward pupils came up with, and a completely distorted view of the past.

There is a major conflict of interest here between musicologists and historians – the former are likely to want something faithful to what they see as the surviving remnants and reputation of the composer, while the latter are more interested in the performances he may have heard. The modern idea of a composer able to demand that performers do his bidding, or indeed that the score might represent a performance at all, is far too often imposed on historical periods when such concepts simply didn’t exist. There are few things more depressing for a singer than having a musicological policeman imposing his or her will ‘because the composer wanted it that way.’ Composition as we now understand it, the creative act of a single inspired mind, perfectly formed in order to be worshipped and interpreted by others, didn’t really exist until Wagner and only found its fully reductive form with Schoenberg and Stravinsky. By treating renaissance composers like their modern equivalents we do the music a huge disservice; we also misrepresent the past and make things much less fun for singers.

From a singer’s point of view, the task of the musicologist is simply to produce a readable score. The edition can have any amount of performance suggestions, but the decisions on what and how to sing should be left to the singers. That’s how it worked at the time. In the case of renaissance music, there is now a living tradition – generations of singers have grown up knowing the rules of ficta and how to interpret proportion signs. We’ve also grown up with the performance practice sources (such as they are) and we know full well that if a source keeps insisting that singers do things in a certain way, it’s because the singers of the time were reluctant to stick to the rules. The single thread that runs through all my research into performance practice is that singers were (until the 20^th century) a law unto themselves. If everybody had sung according to the rules there would have been no need for the frequent complaints about the tritone and other colourful indiscretions.

So…bring on the creative and spontaneous use of theoretical apparatus – let’s have a plurality of performance practice driven by what feels right to those who practice the performing. We rarely discussed ficta in the Hilliard Ensemble, and we had an understanding that the first voice to encounter a problem would set the mode for the rest of the piece. Next time it could be different – there are usually many possibilities (often no right answers) and we wouldn’t want to be stuck with the same solution for ever. On one early trip to the USA we sang at a conference and afterwards an eager PhD student came round to ask if we raised cadential leading notes in late medieval polyphony. ‘Sometimes,’ was our reply. The distaste and incomprehension on the face of the student, whose entire academic career was devoted to getting a definitive answer to this question one way or the other, was a wonder to behold.

Posted in early music, Hilliard Ensemble, history of singing, Performance as Research | No Comments »

YEAR ONE!

August 31st, 2011

FIRST YEAR BACK IN THE REAL WORLD…

It’s coming up to the first anniversary of my return to freelancing. It’s also the anniversary of my first attempts at blogging (thankyou Ned for getting me started – I’m afraid my efforts are never going to match yours).

Made it! I was very heartened by so many people seeming to think I was doing the right thing. Only a few said I was brave (a polite way of saying I was stupid) and it’s been a very exciting year.

I’ve been quite pleased that the academic/pedagogical side hasn’t disappeared altogether. I still get asked to do keynote conference papers, and the doctoral examining has branched out into Europe (really interesting). I’ve done lots of coaching and workshops from Scandinavia to Slovenia, and I’ve encountered some really creative students wanting more than just one-to-one singing lessons. A bit like having postgrads but without all the bureaucracy. It’s ideal really – I get to do the interesting stuff and none of the boring institutional bits. Can’t help feeling a little Schadenfreude thinking of my ex-colleagues about to start a new term…

I wonder if it’s actually possible to give yourself completely to a regular job or project and still keep the freshness (maybe the naivety) that attracted you to it in the first place. Three of the most important things in my life have been Electric Phoenix, The Hilliard Ensemble and my university job. I loved and left them all, and for the same reasons: once I’d got the hang of them and found myself unable to think in terms of permanent revolution any more I just couldn’t knuckle down and get on with it. I never did get to love big brother (though at York I came pretty close once or twice). A very great friend of mine once said I couldn’t cope with success, but I think it’s more a case of just not wanting to grow up. I’m actually very lucky to be able to earn a living as a permanent adolescent – like most of the performers I know, in fact.

It’s been liberating to be able to pursue my own projects, whether in performance, writing or teaching. It hasn’t always been easy – the ECM recording sessions were a bit of a shock to the system (my mistake, and it all turned out OK in the end), and CUP took a while to understand what we had in mind for the referencing system in the history book; and telling a conference in Germany that they should all change their singing teachers when one of them was Francisco Araiza was a bit daft. But on the whole I think I’ve got away with it. There’s been lots of interest in the tenor book, and I’ve corresponded (at length in some cases) with people all over the world who know much more about the topic than I do. My friend Larry Josefovitz, for example – I don’t think he would object to my calling him that even though we have never met – was able to guide me through the Jewish part of the singing history as a result of his having read the tenor book. Larry’s an Orthodox Jew, an American Zionist, and I’m a heathen with a secular European take on religion and the Arab/Israeli comflict, yet in metaphysical and musical matters we have a huge amount in common. Venn Diagrams again.

The gigs have been fantastic – whether sweltering in Seville with Ariel Abramovich, going to Tampere for jury service and Being Dufay, or busking with Gavin Bryars at Opera North’s Howard Assembly Rooms. I’ve also been inspired by some amazing music throughout the year. Not just by friends and colleagues but by musicians I’ve never met. At the top must be Gianluigi Trovesi, whose ECM recording Profumo di Violetta in some ways epitomises the permanent adolescent musical life. You can’t categorise his music: there’s not a trace of the old avant-garde or of post-modernism either – along with 70s Genesis, Satie or Percy Grainger he probably wouldn’t cut it in contemporary academia. We’re going to miss the CD format when it’s gone – just taking the album out of its sleeve is an adventure: the Sascha Kleis cover (typical ECM – where does that water come from? Bergamo’s on a hill…), the Roberto Masotti photos, and the touching liner note by Trovesi himself about the town bands that he grew up with in the northern Italian valleys. Then there’s the music – an exhuberant pillaging of Italian opera from Monteverdi to Mascagni. Has ‘Pur ti miro’ ever sounded more eloquent than as a flugelhorn and saxophone duet, or the windband arrangement of the Orfeo fanfare more riotous? He even makes you wish you could play the clarinet. And it all happens in a magical acoustic representation of the cathedral piazza in Bergamo – where I’ve been so many times with family and friends (and I’m still waiting to be paid for a gig I did in the opera house two years ago).

THE FUTURE

The coming year is also full of excitements: three CDs to record between now and Christmas, and 2012 will see the release of the new Dowland Project album (actual date to be anounced at the end of September), the first Cantum release (July at the York Early Music Festival) and several more Sound & Fury CDs. On the publishing front, CUP will launch the history of singing and two other Cambridge Histories that I’ve contributed chapters to (page proofs for the history book are due back at the Press at the beginning of October and it should be in the shops in February). Gigs and workshops continue to materialise, and I’ll even have time to start on a new book…

Posted in Cantum pulcriorum invenire, coaching, Dowland Project, history of singing, John Potter & Ariel Abramovich, Tenors | No Comments »

STIMMWERCKTAGE: IDYLLIC ADLERSBERG

August 9th, 2011

I’ve just been a guest at the Stimmwercktage at Adlersberg near Regensburg. Stimmwerck is one of the most enterprising and creative acappella groups around, and each year they devote the first weekend in August to one particular composer or manuscript. This year it was the Schalreuter Handschrift, a huge collection of 16th century motets and psalms, many by composers who are otherwise unknown or whose works only survive in this manuscript. The music was collected from the Protestant cantorate all over southern Germany at a time when the Protestants were seeking to create a functioning liturgical music which would rival that of the Catholic establishment. It’s extraordinarily rich stuff (some of the motets are over ten minutes long) – shades of Josquin but in a parallel universe.

Adlersberg is in an idyllic spot on a hill just outside Regensburg. It’s essentially a church (wonderful acoustic) with a large inn, the Prösslbräu, attached. Instead of the nunnery that the church supported, there is now a small brewery which has been in the Prössl family for five generations. It’s the perfect venue for a small festival – music and sustenance straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. In fact we shared our dressing room space with a horse and a goat, both of whom were very friendly.

As well as joining Stimmwerck for some stunning motets and doing the occasional lute version with Paul O’Dette, I was asked to give a workshop on singing renaissance music. It was bursting with people, and there were some very courageous and receptive singers. I talked for about half an hour first, beginning with the reasons why the modern singing of renaissance music is like it is, and contrasting it with instrumental practice. Early instrumentalists generally have a much closer relationship with actual history, having the benefit of a thriving community of practice with players and makers actually having to do research (as opposed to singers rarely being able to get round the singing teacher problem). I also talked about the real life of renaissance music – the actual use to which it was mostly put (as opposed to the surviving manuscripts which had relatively little use), and Paul O’Dette and I busked a version of one of the Schalreuter pieces. Using the original polyphony as source material for doing your own thing was standard 16^th century practice; we did a different version in the evening concert and had the students trying to improve on the original too. Sometimes workshop participants are bemused by my take on early music (they’ve usually been taught the difference between renaissance right and wrong) but times are definitely changing – and this was one of those wonderful occasions when you could see the lights going on in people’s heads.

A big thankyou to the Stimmwerckers – Marcus, Klaus, Gerhard and Franz (seen here with yours truly, goat and horse). It was a privilege to be part of it. Stimmwerck have many enthusiastic supporters of all ages, and there was a real sense of a musical community coming together to have a great time. If anyone fancies rolling up next year, they’re doing music from the Trent Codices – some of the most amazing music ever written – so book early to be sure of a seat. Deutschland Radio are broadcasting some of this year’s music Sunday 21^st at 7.00 if you’re near a computer.

Posted in coaching, early music, ensemble singing | No Comments »

DOWLAND PROJECT NEWS

July 21st, 2011

New Release early 2012

ECM have confirmed that the new Dowland Project album will be released next year. We won’t know the actual date till September, but it’s likely to be sometime before April. This is particularly exciting news as it will bring together all the musicians who’ve played for the band, Stephen Stubbs, John Surman, Barry Guy, Maya Homburger and Milos Valent. It means we’ll be able to perform in various permutations, depending on players’ availability (and promoters’ budgets), and we’re hoping that everyone will be in Europe in September 2012 so we can do concerts then (if you’re a promoter reading this, please contact Robert White Artist Management: RWhiteAM@aol.com).

History…

This will be our fourth album, and as it’s so difficult to get everyone together, possibly our last. Unfortunately, we all now live in different countries (Steve Stubbs in the USA, John Surman in Norway, Milos Valent in Slovakia, Barry Guy & Maya Homburger in Switzerland and I’m in York). It’s been a wonderfully inspiring adventure, which began twelve years ago with Manfred Eicher’s famous response to my original suggestion of Dowland….’ah, but you don’t want to use any of those boring early music players, do you?’. To which I replied after only a nano-second’s hesitation ‘…er, no of course not.’ The first album didn’t have the name, we just called it Dowland. The original plan was to put my name on the front but I couldn’t agree to the other players not being there too, so I joined them on the back. We always referred to it as ‘the Dowland project’, so when the second album ‘ Care Charming Sleep’ came round, the name chose itself. But there’s no Dowland on it, some people pointed out. It’s as in the Monteverdi Choir doing Bach, I’d reply, not entirely accurately.

This is what we looked like at our launch gig in Bremen back in the twentieth century:

Steve Stubbs has always been the engine room of the band, and having played with everyone from Chuck Berry to William Christie there’s nothing he can’t cope with or be inspired by.

Steve and I have worked together for years, since we first met soon after I joined the Hilliard Ensemble. Barry Guy I’d known even longer, and I’ve been involved in some iconic Guy works over the years. He wrote Hold Hands and Sing for Electric Phoenix back in the seventies – a Dada-based riot of a piece featuring the Magical Movement Machine – and then the multi-instrumental Waiata for me and Philip Pickett (bits of which Richard Wistreich and I still perform); he wrote Un Coup de Des for the Hilliard Composition Competition and I used to do it regularly with students at York. John Surman I only knew as a jazz legend, but I very quickly got to know and enjoy his wonderfully quirky playing across that creative borderline where we operate (not to mention his sense of humour – he could literally dumbfound me mid-piece). Maya Homburger and Milos Valent came, like me, from the world of early music, but from that end of it which, like jazz, knows few constraints. We work very closely with producer Manfred Eicher, whose input into the recording sessions has always been transformative and inspirational.

The ‘Night Sessions’

The working title is ‘Night Sessions’. It’s been very hard to keep quiet about this, as I think it’s by far the best thing we’ve done. Most of the tracks date from 2002 after we recorded Care Charming Sleep. In fact it’s just a single session which we recorded having finished the album and spent the evening celebrating. Way past my bed time Manfred suggested we go back in the church and record some more. We didn’t have any more music so we used medieval poems as a basis for improvisation. The result was radically different from anything we’d done before (Barry, Maya, Steve and JS all at their brilliant best). We didn’t even think of releasing it as it was so different from anything else we’d done , and we thought that people would be completely baffled by it. So time passed and in 2006 we recorded Romaria as a step t0wards this new direction. The Romaria sessions included the bizarre 14th century Fumeurs Fumee (with its impenetrable text about smoking dope of some sort), one of several medieval pieces that didn’t fit with the rest of the material, and we decided to put these with the Night Sessions music to make a complete album. It’s certainly the most extraordinary record we’ve ever made: medieval music in the usual Dowland Project style, plus medieval-inspired improvisation that transcends all of the usual parameters by about a million miles. All the improv pieces are single takes so it has a fantastically live feel to it.

More details on the release and tour dates as we get them.

Posted in Dowland Project, ECM, Manfred Eicher | No Comments »

History of Singing/History of the Dowland Project

June 30th, 2011

We must have written it because you can pre-order it on Amazon…It’s ridiculously expensive, but I imagine there’ll be an affordable paperback eventually.

We’re now into copy editing and indexing, the latter now a week ovedue. It’s a bit different from my first effort for CUP, where I was just left to get on with it. The Press’ production and marketing operation is impressively rigorous. Negotiating with a copy editor is a bit like working with a record producer – they represent the innocent consumer (what lawyers call the vicious bystander…) and see/hear things that you yourself might never be aware of. I generally go with what the editor suggests if I possibly can, and so it is with producers – I very rarely listen to what I’ve recorded between the sound check and getting the first edit. If the producer’s happy, then I’m likely to be too. You have to trust them, and ultimately you have to let go.

Indexing is computerised so that electronic formats aren’t dependent on print pagination. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this (and I’ve already managed to lose a whole day’s work, which was absolutely maddening); it’s incredibly tedious until you’ve accumulated a sufficiently huge number of entries to make yourself seem quite clever, and even then you eventually lose the will to live. With Vocal Authority and the tenor book I was left to my own devices; mindful of how thin the VA one is I tried really hard with the tenor index but did it all by hand. I have to say that so far I’m not convinced by the electronic indexing process – it’s very labour-intensive (there can be a dozen keystrokes per entry in addition to the term itself). Because it’s electronic you don’t have to wait for the page proofs (with the real page numbers), but this places a huge burden on authors, just to gain a few weeks production time. If we could do it with the real page numbers it would take a fraction of the time. It will have taken me about three weeks, as opposed to about a week if done in the old fashioned analogue way.

A History of the Dowland Project

The book is supposed to be in the warehouse in January and in the shops sometime after that, so it will roughly coincide with the new album from the Dowland Project. Not sure if this is good or bad (it’s entirely coincidental). The DP album is also a history of a kind: it’s material that we didn’t manage to fit onto Romaria plus the ‘night sessions’ that followed Care Charming Sleep. More details later. There should be live gigs to coincide with the new album, so watch this space.

Being Dufay

Thanks to Mick Lynch for this link to John Schaefer’s WNYC podcast, in which he plays music by living composers who use renaissance models – John’s usual imaginative mix including a couple of bits of BD and some nice Nico Muhly. There is a new bit of video from Tampere on the Being page, featuring an extract from Ambrose Field’s new piece.

Stimmwercktage

Most of July is given over to sorting the book so I’m really looking forward to my next musical event, which is being a guest at the Stimmwercktage (near Regensburg) with Paul O’dette. Details to follow in a bit, but the Stimmwerck site will give you an idea.

Posted in Being Dufay, Dowland Project, history of singing | No Comments »

Messiah!

June 28th, 2011

Messiah in Cambridge was a wonderful occasion – lots of people determined to have a good time for a good cause (we raised over £4500 for the Clifford Bartlett Appeal). Great to catch up with old friends too, and I even enjoyed singing something I vowed not to do again about thirty years ago.

A lot of the credit has to go to Peter Holman. He directed from the keyboard with minimum interference and maximum joy. The slimmed down Parley sparkled away, but what was really impressive was that you felt that anything could happen and the players were listening so acutely that they’d always be there. There were some marvelous divisions from Emma Kirkby and Clare Wilkinson (fabulous to have a woman alto as Handel originally intended), and we all did things slightly differently in performance from the rehearsal. It was refreshingly different from a St John Passion I did at York a few years ago when I was told (several times) not to do a certain appoggiatura as Bach wouldn’t have liked it.

We were using Clifford Bartlett’s OUP edition, which is a model of how these things should be done (the pics here are from the 1868 facsimile which I inherited from my father). Like Clifford himself, it’s generous, scholarly and eminently practical. There’s a thoughtful introduction which explains why he hasn’t larded it with editorial suggestions (mainly because they have a tendency to become incorporated into every performance, and in any case, competent singers know what to do these days). He’s stuck with Handel’s autograph and the corrected versions by his copyists, of course, which are not the scores the singers would have performed from. The corrections of underlay by J C Smith are more likely to represent what singers actually sang (reproducing Handel’s more idiosyncratic stresses just sounds daft) so maybe the next stage in editorial evolution is to set the singers free from the printed underlay altogether. They’d certainly have done their own at the time.

I still find it hard to identify the enduring appeal of the piece. It wasn’t that much more successful in Handel’s own lifetime than many of his other huge successes. You expect great tunes, creative fugues and so on in Handel (and there’s even a couple of killer modulations worthy of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway), but I suspect that what made the difference was Charles Jennens’ libretto. It’s a wonderfully poetic collage of texts from both halves of the King James Bible; although it obviously had a later appeal to Victorian sentiment it still works today because you don’t have to believe in God to believe in the synthesis created by composer and librettist. In ‘Thy rebuke’ it also has the single most moving tenor recit ever written, made all the more poignant by the reference to ‘comfort’ which is the very first word uttered in the whole piece.

The standing for the Hallelujah Chorus thing was done with a nice hint of irony. The problem won’t ever go away – and nor should it really, it’s the audience’s prerogative. It’s just a pity so many people feel obliged to do it (we soloists sat even lower in our pews). My own take on the historical circumstances is that George was happily slumbering away, woke up with a start at the Hallelujah and realised he needed a pee. He stood up to go, but found his way barred because everyone else had stood up too. History doesn’t record what happened next, unfortunately.

I’m very glad I did it, but I can’t imagine doing it again. I find it almost unbelievable that there was a time when my ‘bread and butter’ work (see below…) all those years ago was the same tiny number of Bach and Handel pieces. What a bizarre way to earn a living. Compare it with the singers who sang for Handel – they might have done the piece more than once, but if so they’d expect it to be re-written for them each time; there was no ‘bread and butter’ repertoire – each piece was new and had to be learned from scratch. Exciting times.

One slightly dispiriting thing about being in Cambridge was seeing the plethora of posters for musical events. These were almost identical to 40 years ago – the same old Bach, Handel, Mozart and the odd ‘English choral classic’. It’s also the same as you find in every other university town in the land, the difference being that at Cambridge it’s student entrepreneurs perpetuating stasis rather than university lecturers who should know better. Not sure which is worse. Do students really want to stump up £27,000 to be taught what their parents (and grandparents) were taught? Surely the more imaginative are eventually going to find better things to get into debt for.

Posted in early music, Messiah | 2 Comments »

Tenors: collecting and connecting

June 21st, 2011

Enthusiasm & knowledge

I gave a talk to the Recorded Vocal Art Society last week. It operates under the wing of The Record Collector, which is required reading for anyone interested in historical singers in general and tenors in particular. Most of the Society’s members are collectors and many have an interest in the tenor voice, and it was my Tenor: History of a Voice that precipitated the invitation. I had to confess that unlike their usual celebrity speakers I was not really an expert in the topic, and I told them the story of how the book came to be written, and something of my background (which is one of the reasons it is how it is); being an ex-choirboy with distinctly ambiguous feelings about opera I had to make quite a journey from looking at tenors dispassionately, ‘academically’ even, to finally coming to understand and appreciate the real thing. Many people in the audience knew far more about curious corners of tenordom than I did, but I was really touched by how many of them appreciated the book, and by how they really enjoyed sharing information about their favourite singers. I must have read every one of the hundreds of tenor articles in The Record Collector, and like the audience at my talk, they all combine obsessive detail with fanatical enthusiasm. You can’t beat knowledgeable people who really love their subject, and I’m very grateful to those of the collecting fraternity who manage to put pen to paper. My book wouldn’t be the same without them.

Criticism & knowledge

When I was doing my PhD one of the lecturers asked me what music I really liked performing. That’s always a difficult one, as I don’t really think in terms of liking or disliking a piece. It’s more a question of engaging with it, so whatever you’re currently working on is the most important piece, and you don’t need to decide whether you like it or not. That sounds like a lack of critical judgement, said the lecturer. The C word is problematic for performers – we don’t really do critical judgement, we just do the music. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to commit to new music or perform different repertoires; some of my unreconstructed modernist composer friends find it incomprehensible that I also perform minimalist music (and vice versa). But for non-performers, and academics in particular, critiquing of one sort or another is fundamental to the discipline. I’m not quite sure how this came about, but it wasn’t the case fifty years ago or so. It’s a shame it has such negative connotations – we could have called it ‘analytical theory’ or something more neutral, and maybe more academics might appear to enjoy their topics.

MESSIAH!

The day draws nigh. Not quite sure why it’s quite such a source of mirth to some of my friends – after all, in days of yore I used to mount ye olde warhorse several times a year just like a proper singer. But if you want to share your amazement in public, come along to Great St Mary’s in Cambridge next Sunday (26^th) at 6.00. It’s for a very good cause (the Clifford Bartlett Appeal) and will have proper singers too (Emma Kirkby, Clare Wilkinson & Stephen Varcoe, with Peter Holman conducting The Parley). We’re going to have a lot of fun (and there definitely won’t be any more!). Tickets can be had from the Suffolk Villages Festival box office.

Cardiff singer of a very small number of roles

I tried to watch Cardiff Singer of the World. So much wonderful talent being squandered on such a tiny corner of a repertoire that we all know all too well. Were there any tunes that most of the audience hadn’t heard before? It wasn’t so different from hearing autotuned club music – you just knew what was coming next. I caught Mary King, who’s a lovely person, great teacher and very experienced singer, saying that Fiordiligi was going to be bread and butter for some successful soprano for years to come. How sad to live on bread and butter (even though more like brioche in this case) when there’s such a rich diet available to those who have the will to seek it out. It was a snap shot of all that is awesome and awful about the opera scene at the moment. In a few years time many of those with such glittering prospects are going to find themselves up against the Cardiff Singers of the future who’ll be even more brilliant. And cheaper.

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Choirs as Ensembles

June 18th, 2011

Some years ago I was asked to contribute a chapter to a choral yearbook in Finland. The project didn’t actually materialise and I came across an old draft of it a few days ago. It’s about choir singers taking more responsibility, rather than relying on the conductor too much. Post-Tampere seems a good time to re-consider this sort of thing, so here are some edited bits of it…

Choirs and ensembles

As an ensemble singer I’m used to the subtle nuances that are possible when you work with the same people over a long period of time, or with musicians who have a similar background and experience: Red Byrd has always works on the principle of equal creative responsibility from everyone taking part, and the Sound & the Fury works in a similar way (as does the Dowland Project). For me it goes back to my time with the Hilliard Ensemble, which evolved an intuitive way of doing things and would make a point of singing even quite large-scale works such as Arvo Pärt’s Passio with no one out front. This was a liberating experience and while I sang with the Hilliards I certainly didn’t envisage becoming a conductor myself; ensemble singing had become so sophisticated that it was hard to imagine handing over creative responsibility to one person. Over the years I began to put my thoughts together on how ensemble singing actually works, some of which found their way into the ‘Ensemble Singing’ chapter in my Cambridge Companion to Singing, and when I went to work at the University of York I began to apply some basic rules to student ensembles, trying to equip them with the means to work on their own without outside input. I ran an MA in Ensemble Singing and a number of excellent ensembles came to work with me over the twelve years I was there. Eventually I also found myself conducting various chamber choirs, beginning with a small women’s choir (there was the usual excess of women singers at the university). I had done some coaching sessions with the Finnish Radio Choir in the past and more recently with the Latvian Radio Choir, and it was understood that my role then was to give them an idea of how to sing without a conductor or at least to encourage them to be more responsive and pro-active, to be active participants in the creative process in partnership with the conductor. My only experience of actual conducting was a very long time ago when I conducted a concert by the Worcester Police Male Voice Choir as a favour to a friend (Henry Sandon, he of the Antiques Road Show; we were both Lay Clerks at Worcester Cathedral at the time). I was able to agree to this because it was made clear to me by the police chief that whatever I did in the way of gestures, the choir would sing the pieces the same way they did them last time and the time before that; all I had to do was put on the uniform and wave (and a certain leniency with regard to future parking fines was hinted at). So when I (reluctantly) came to conduct at York, with virtually no experience of conducting and no recent experience of singing in a choir, my ensemble singing experience was all I had to fall back on; the logical approach was to make the choir as much like an ensemble as possible.

Channels of communication

From my perspective as a singer it has always seemed a bit odd that the choir seems to do all the work and the conductor gets all the credit, so one of my first concerns was to establish a way of working that made it quite clear that the choir was an organic entity, capable of performing by itself. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t want to take the credit for my part in the proceedings – I have a performer’s ego just like anyone else – but rather that my role was defined a little differently from that of a traditional conductor. The first thing to do was to convince the choir that they didn’t need me standing out in front, provided we could agree on a number of basic performance conventions that would, in effect, replace some of the actions that they might expect a conductor to take. I have found that the way to do this is to go right back to basics and discuss the question of communication: who is communicating with whom and what is it that they are communicating. Of course, singers communicate with audiences; we all understand that. But perhaps even more important is the communication that singers have with their fellow performers. As an image, I’ve found it helpful to suggest to singers that these two types of communication are conceptualised in two directions. Their voices, faces and body language, communicate directly with the audience but their ears are operating at right angles to this, starting with the singers standing next to them and continuing along the line as far as they can hear. Once the idea of this two-element model of communication is established we can begin to analyse what actually happens in performance.

Communicative value

The dynamics of such a model are much more complicated than this simple strategy appears to imply. Communication with the audience is not usually a problem: choirs are used to looking up from the music and demonstrating their own enthusiasm or emotional commitment to the music. The listener constructs his or her interpretation of the performance and this is only partly determined by anything the performers might do: the meanings transmitted by the singers will be modified by the listeners in the light of their own knowledge and experience. Communication between voices in the choir is a different matter and has to be learned. The first thing to demonstrate is that everything has communicative value, whether it is a gesture, a note or even a breath, and unlike the broader relationship with the audience, communicative acts between singers contain specific information. This is the first and most important principle that will enable the choir to work as a thinking creative entity. Everything else flows from the understanding that everything a singer does contains information useful to his or her fellow singers. We can elaborate on the basic model by thinking of audience communication as visual and vocal and essentially one-way, whereas internal choir communication involves a two-way channel that is both vocal and auditory. Essentially, singers transmit and receive information among themselves with every gesture they make, whether vocal or physical.

Auditory awareness: tempo and breath

Once we know that we can communicate with each other, we then have to think about what sort of information we are giving and receiving. Much of the useful information is to do with tempo, and almost all communicative acts between singers contain information that either confirms the tempo or offers the possibility of modifying it. The process begins before a piece starts with the first breath that the singers take. If, for example, a piece starts on a downbeat, then the first breath will act as an upbeat. Everyone will have an idea of what the tempo should be, and roughly when the piece is going to start. An alert choir should be able to negotiate a tempo within the space of that upbeat breath, leaving only one place where the downbeat will inevitably come. It may take a bit of getting used to in rehearsals if the choir has always relied on being brought in by the conductor, but I found with my York choirs that the singers very quickly got used to starting themselves and it became routine (I just told them where to start from and they would automatically set off in a unanimous tempo). Giving singers the responsibility for their own music causes a rise in energy level: they know they have to be awake and listening in order to make it work. In concert this frees their eyes to be looking directly at the audience, rather than focusing on the conductor. The effect of a large body of singers starting simultaneously and in tempo without any visible means of support can be breathtaking for audiences, especially those who have previously thought of the conductor as the prime source of inspiration. The whole process seems to happen by magic. The ‘magic’ element is an important part of ensemble singing, and it’s at this point that my previous witterings about note-giving come into play…

More ramblings to follow…

Posted in coaching, ensemble singing, Hilliard Ensemble, Tampere Vocal Festival | No Comments »