Speaking of music – a hotly contested potato?
It’s that time of year again when school and university students up and down the country are facing deadline days and examinations. Assignment writing through the night on coffee and energy tablets, revision cramming as you struggle down the corridor towards the exam room… we all know the drill. And thus it is also time for Times Higher Education’s annual ‘exam howlers’ competition, in which university exam markers submit their favourite student slip-ups. The 2013 line-up featured some real corkers, and in a turn of phrase that had me and several other friends rolling about with laughter, one student described a controversial documentary as a ‘hotly contested potato’. How’s that for a metaphor, er, ‘mash’-up? (Sorry, couldn’t resist…)
Silly slips under pressure aside for a moment – and heaven knows I must have written some similar nonsense in my own undergrad assessments – there is a serious point to be made here about the ways in which we are taught to communicate. My own enthusiastic bunch of students look at me rather questioningly, year on year, when I implore them to consider their readers. Who on earth can I be talking about? I’m the one supervising them, and I’m also the primary marker, right? Well… yes. But I am not the only marker. And even if I have led them from notes to drafts over the course of the module, I don’t consider my remit as an assessor to involve remembering the various mental machinations we’ve been through over the past few months. The submitted project should stand alone as a clear, well-presented piece of work that is carefully reasoned and fluently written.
Of course, since I teach in a music college, to ask a student to consider their reader as their audience might be the way to get the point across. But verbal communication between a musician and an audience of any kind – reading, listening on record/radio/YouTube, or in attendance at a live event – is a rather different kettle of fish to walking on stage (or into the studio), tuning up your violin and performing a Bach Partita. I know musicians who loathe speaking before they play, who tell me it ruins their head for subsequent performance; and others who are desperate to say something, anything, to break the fourth wall before they have to get down to the music-making.
What does this have to do with hotly contested potatoes? Well, it’s quite simple, really: the better your understanding of language and your awareness of how you come across to others, the easier you will find it to talk to people. This is just as true when you’re in the pub with your closest friends, as when you’re confronted with 500 strangers at the Wigmore Hall. There’s no point reeling off a brief sonata form analysis of that Beethoven Sonata you’re about to play to a non-specialist audience who’ve never of sonata form; nor is there any point in discussing last night’s episode of Eastenders with your mates in Urdu if they don’t speak it. Similarly, those mates of yours are probably far more interested in finding out whether or not your date on Wednesday was any good, than how many times this week you remembered to do the dishes or whether your socks matched when you left for work this morning. (I say ‘probably’ since I’ve never met your mates and it does, after all, take all sorts.) Audiences are far more likely to care about the piece they’re going to hear if they are told interesting things about it, than if they are given a succession of droned-out general factoids with which they cannot easily engage.
Ok, so much for your awareness of how you come across to others. What about your understanding of language? Because this is the thing that I find particularly interesting – much as I could happily witter on about presentation techniques all day (and will happily do so in another post if you want me to). How do we speak or write about music? That famous line, variously attributed to Martin Mull, Frank Zappa and Elvis Costello, ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture’, is not famous for nothing. There are certain elements of music that simply can’t be written about convincingly, because if the thing could be captured entirely in words, there would be no need for the sound that music makes. But that doesn’t mean that a cop-out string of superlatives is the answer either. Language is crucial, and it is a crucial tool in engaging an audience. All of our music, all of this wonderful, rich, varied soundworld that has been evolving for centuries past, was created by human beings. And my goodness, human beings are interesting. They write music for friends and lovers; they dedicate it to the state or in memory of mentors and teachers. They choose key signatures that conjure the shades of Mozart or Bach, and borrow ensemble combinations from music written hundreds of years before they were born. They try to write down birdsong, record passing cars and overwrought preachers, and turn them into evocative compositions. They also engage with the nitty-gritty of musical structure in a way that you can hear – shared themes or quotations, motives turned upside down and inside out. They make you listen harder.
Audiences adore hearing musicians speak about their performances – everything from why they chose the repertoire to how they have gone about preparing for an event. They enjoy being drawn into that intimate conversation with not only the artist in front of them, but the composer and his friends, teachers, dedicatees, and all those others who helped to create the music that they can look forward to hearing. That means that the musicians have to take time to learn about the histories of the music that they are playing, whether that can be achieved by making a phone call to the composer, being the composer and explaining how you came to write that piece, or investigating the dauntingly vast literature on music of previous generations. The greatest reward, of course, is that of advocacy: communicate your passion and the importance of what you do, in the spoken arena as well as the played one, and you build yourself an audience who are carried on the wave of your talent and enthusiasm. If the musicians of the future are to rise to that challenge of communicating their passion in words, as well as notes, those of us who have the privilege of working with them as they train must take that responsibility very seriously. I’d wager that’s one potato that no one would contest.
