Music Monday - Which layer of the music do you hear best?

A couple of weeks ago I attended a singing concert given by our graduating class of acting students. It is a class that I have taught for the past 25 years, and passed up this year as the start of a general reducing of my teaching hours. 

For past concerts I have been the accompanist and this time I was in the audience enjoying the whole experience. A couple of observations surprised me. For a start, I found that my attention kept straying to the pianist – despite compelling story-telling from the singers concerned. Was part of me wishing I was still on the piano stool? Or was it the fact that the accompanist is one of our finest local pianists? Or something else?

One of the challenges in training classes of acting students to sing is that there is a wide range of natural ability, experience and inclination present. This group were all strong at the story-telling aspect of singing, a couple had pitch issues and several are all round strong singers. With the last category, I was more able to appreciate the whole tapestry of their song – text on melody and the harmonic layers of the accompaniment.

In the week which followed, I was in one of my secondary school singing classes, but for once the students were silent. They were completing a written ‘marking up the score’ task in preparation for some sight-singing. In nearby rooms the faint sounds of clarinet and violin lessons could be heard. One of the students commented on how distracting the sounds were. Another said that she always likes to hear the background lessons when we are quiet in our singing class. Someone else noticed that the violin and clarinet clashed with each other but yet another student remarked that she thought it sounded like a really interesting piece of (unintentional) music. At this point a student, who had been intensely focussed on figuring out the solfa for the sight-singing piece, looked up and asked, “What are you talking about? I don’t hear anything.”

We can never really know what audiences hear when they listen to music. For example, that wonderful, evocative wash of sound in so many piano concerti of the Romantic period is created by the harmonic structure. We hum the tunes, but we inwardly hear the harmonies from both piano and orchestra.

How can we submit to the complete tapestry of music without our own preferences (and prejudices?) distracting?

Is it easier for audiences without music training to appreciate the whole concert experience?

These are my current preoccupying thoughts.

Music Monday - What makes some music difficult to play or sing?

I am currently doing vocal coaching on a high school production of “Mary Poppins”. The cast are specialist music theatre students in a college of the arts and the orchestra are specialist music students at the same school. It is my first time working on this show and from the outset I was surprised at how difficult and complex the musical score is. The Sherman brothers have written many moments in the vocal ensemble in up to 6 -part harmony. Dissonance is used as an effect. There are sudden vocal modulations  - with no  helpful modulating chords from the orchestra. The score is musically dense – both vocally and orchestrally. Much of our preparation time has been spent working out which notes in a chord we could leave out without losing the harmonic effect and intention at that moment.

It is proving to be a challenging gig for all involved, so I was mildly frustrated recently when, after a particularly long session in the rehearsal room, a friend remarked, “Mary Poppins? That’s not difficult music!”

That casual remark set me thinking. Of course, we all know the tunes from the show – think “Feed The Birds”, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, “Chim Chim Cheree”, “Go Fly A Kite”. Those are all catchy tunes and we can hum them easily. In this case, it is the arrangements which make the music difficult.

Many years ago, I attended the state finals of the ABC’s Concerto and Vocal competition, held in the Basil Kirke Studio in the long defunct ABC studios on Adelaide Terrace in Perth. David Helfgott (of movie “Shine” fame) was one of the piano finalists. At that time, he was going through mental health challenges, but was nonetheless a virtuosic player, in a class all his own. He played  Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini” with such power and speed that I wondered if he would cause the Steinway grand to move across the floor, such was his passion. Yet, when he reached the 18th variation (the famous, legato, melancholic one) his playing and interpretation was curiously detached. This variation is the easiest, technically, to play, but it demands that the pianist make the piano really sing. On that day it was just too difficult for him and his headspace. A different kind of musical difficulty.

And, by way of another example, in the world of singing, especially as it applies to young singers, some technically easy songs can have texts which are too sophisticated, or which deal with themes beyond the singer’s life experience and maturity. And then some other songs, with appropriate themes, can be annoyingly hard in terms of range or vocal intensity required.

There are many definitions of musical difficulty.

Getting back to Mary Poppins. The show is fun and appropriate for young singer actors, provided that they commit to many, many hours of intense dance and vocal calls. But easy? Definitely not!

Music Monday - COVID 19 + Singing

This report was brought to my attention a few days ago. It is definitely worth a read. (NATS is the highly respected professional association of singing teachers in the USA; the American equivalent of ANATS in Australia.)

Now while it must be remembered that the viral load is very much larger in the USA than here in Australia, the report gives us much food for thought:

Adequate spacing and distancing between singers in any ensemble, choir, class or individual voice lesson will be the only safe way to teach and rehearse for the foreseeable future.

Some of our traditional singing warmup practices of touching our faces and feeling for vibration will be only possible within the most stringent of hygienic practice.

We singing teachers need to be vigilant in watching for and calling out students touching mouths, noses and eyes during our lessons.

As Australia moves towards easing the Covid-19 restrictions over the coming months, we face a challenging time ahead as we all work together to find ways to continue making music safely and with artistic integrity.