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Guest post by Cheyney Kent (originally published in a shortened form on medium.com)

Twelve years ago I stood opposite a sculpture by the American abstract artist Donald Judd at Tate Modern. The sculpture was a box. A lime green perspex box, the size of a large domestic water tank, but simply a box nonetheless.

It seemed rather disappointing — until I began to feel myself falling into it.

Nothing violent had happened. I’d not slipped, or been pushed. Instead, I’d tried putting my cynicism aside. The result wasn’t revelation or enlightenment. Instead I discovered a different relationship to the piece (and the exhibition – and sculpture in general).

Last week I hovered on all sorts of thresholds. I had been attending the Southwell Music Festival, a classical music festival in the East Midlands. I was there as both a performer and also social media liaison.

Having two roles means that I occupy different spaces. I can be in the centre of the room as a performer. I can be in the centre of the room as the audience. I can be inside the room but with a liaison’s – a functionary’s – purpose; taking notes, turning pages, operating a camera. I can be outside the room, looking in; and occasionally in a different room listening to a relay or watching on a screen.

There are so many proximities or grades of engagement. The threshold – the often arbitrary or imaginary demarcation between them – is a nice idea to scratch at.

You get thresholds inside the music you’re listening to as well. There is an evanescent but substantial one in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (performed as the central event of this year’s Southwell Music Festival). Approaching the denouement, a narrating Angel tells the eponymous Soul

And now the threshold, as we traverse it utters aloud its glad responsive chant

and the music changes, with dynamic and harmonic doors opened (not unlike the theatrically labelled ‘Transformation Music’ in the parallel passage of Wagner’s theosophical drama Parsifal). The music introduces a different space, with a concomitant change of view, and perhaps even of energy or temperature. It is a physical change. Of course, we’re all still sitting in our seats or standing to sing. We’ve not gone anywhere.

The Dream of Gerontius at Southwell Music Festival (photo Nick Rutter)
The Dream of Gerontius at Southwell Music Festival (photo Nick Rutter)

Being in the same space as the musician to whom you are listening is a remarkable, elastic experience. It’s typical to breathe at the same time as a good performer and to feel their rolling with the camber of the music, as they perform it.

Volume is neither here nor there: you can have the same experience of being oppressed or beckoned by a musical gesture from row Z.

But this experience isn’t available behind a certain threshold. Perhaps that’s a smartphone screen. Maybe you’re standing outside the room, where performer and audience alike are like goldfish at a fair, commodified in a venue-bag where the acquisition of the memory negates the experience that won it.

I have my own experience from the same week to share.

Early during the Festival I’d walked close up to a performance of Strauss’ Metamorphosen to take a couple of photographs for social sharing. I was concentrating on my job. As I turned to leave however, I began to hear – to engage with – the music. The physical connection to this acoustically unmediated sound, this fine playing of fine music actually stopped me from walking away, as if I were tethered. I hadn’t followed the drama or narrative of the music (as I would with Elgar the following evening) as I wandered inside the notional and actual extremities of the performance space. In a moment I was reminded that I had passed these topographical thresholds to get my pictures: my intent – and relationship to the performance – had changed as I put down the camera.

All of this is representative of my experience of being in different places, and different roles, in a performance space.

I really like and value the potential of socially-shared media to create a platform and context for performance. I like that there’s a way to create an opportunity to discuss an experience. There’s value in capturing images or sounds that trigger the stored physical experience of being in the audience.

They’re slippery though. They can also offend – that’s not too strong a term – other people who occupy the same physical space but don’t share your intent. The complex physical manifestation between physicality and acoustic sound in an aesthetic context, which is the spaghetti of thought I’m trying to hold in the inadequate ‘threshold’ idea, means that not everyone has the same sensation at the same time. As performers are listen to one another in ensemble, so we have to be kind to one another in audiences!

The point about thresholds is that they are real but they are not obvious. Distance is no threshold in itself. It’s the authenticity and intent of our apprehension that dictates whether we’re really present for the performance or not. It’s OK to stand in a room opposite a perspex box asking what the point is, if that is the only authentic thought you can grab hold of. If you snap it on a phone to try and work it out later, you may have missed the point.

(Photo credit: Nick Rutter)

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Cheyney Kent works in singing and social media for arts: cheyneykent.co.uk

You can read Cheyney’s blog at songstageandstory.blogspot.co.uk 

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A guest post by Dr Katy Hamilton

About ten years ago, when I first started my PhD, a fellow student explained to me the concept of self-efficacy. It’s a simple, logical premise: you are more likely to do well at something if you believe that you really can do it well – and visualising yourself doing whatever it is to the best of your abilities is a key tool. Whether it’s running the 100m faster than Usain Bolt, or playing the Elgar Cello Concerto to a packed concert hall and live TV cameras, you should imagine it happening, in as much detail as possible, to prepare for the actual event.

Rather less glamorously, I have a simple scenario that I like to play in my head from time to time. It goes like this. Audience members arrive at an evening concert. They say hello to old friends, buy a programme, wave their ticket at the usher, and sit down. They read the programme and chat amongst themselves. They might even chat about some of the things they’re reading about. Then, comfortable and hopefully a little edified or enlightened, they listen to the performance. On a really good night, they might glance again at the notes in the interval and even after the concert. When they get home, they’ll either throw the programme into the recycling, or keep it, if they are the collecting sort, or if it was a very special occasion.

It’s not smashing a world record, I grant you, but whether or not you enjoy your programme notes matters to me. That’s because I write quite a lot of them, and I do so not because it’s a good way of paying the bills, or an excuse to show off, or an outlet for academic material I couldn’t fit into an article, or any of the other negative reasons the cynics might imagine. I write them because I love finding out more about music, and learning new repertoire; and I love communicating – or at least trying to communicate – some of that sense of discovery and excitement to audience members just before they get the chance to hear the music live.

The process of writing a programme note is different for everyone, and obviously since I’m not the performer, there’s a great deal of information I can’t give you. I can’t tell you how they feel about the work in question. I can’t talk you through the experience of playing it (or at least, I can if it’s a piano work, since I’m a pianist, but it’s not my experience you’re interested in, and rightly so). I can’t tell you why the programme consists of that sequence of pieces in that order, unless the performer has thought to tell me, or I can work it out as I read (which is one of my favourite games).

But I can tell you a lot of other stuff. When something was written, where and perhaps why; what the composer, first performer or early reviewers thought of it; if there are diaries or letters from the composer about it; what the highs and lows of its reception have been; and how it’s put together, what it is exactly that you’re listening to. And no, that doesn’t mean ‘dry’ analysis. Anyway, if I gave you a blow-by-blow account, it would be a complete waste of words when you’re sitting in a dark concert hall with no chance of making out the tiny print as the sounds whizz past. But I can mention the structure, and a few things worth listening out for.

I won’t have many words to do this in, probably. The average programme note is 250 words long, for a chamber concert. That’s about a quarter of this post. And it often remains 250 words whether you’re writing about the Diabelli Variations or a single Chopin waltz. If you want a sense of how much work that takes, how much reading, research, listening and score examination, I can tell you that a set of notes I’m working on at the moment, destined to be 1,000 words when I’m finished, will be hewn from a lump of around 3,000 words of notes – and I haven’t quite finished the reading yet.

I was delighted that Fran (AKA The Cross-Eyed Pianist) asked me to write this post, because there are a few things I’d like to say on behalf of those of us who write programme notes. The first is, quite simply, that the programme note is not dead. It is not a waste of paper, not a patronising attempt at educating ‘you little people’ in the audience. It is not a job that is ever ‘done’, and it evolves over time – when I write a concert’s worth of notes, even if I’ve written on half the pieces before, I always tailor my writing to create a unified whole. We have not said everything there is to say about Bach’s Italian Concerto, and even if we had, we would only have said it to one or two very particular audiences’ worth. Every concert is a new experience, a new musical construction, and a new opportunity for different listeners in a space they might never have visited, with a player they might never have heard.

The second is that whatever you might think about the label ‘musicologist’, we are not attempting to create something removed from the live music you are there to hear. I wish I could talk to more performers about why they’re doing what they’re doing. Or interview them. Or get them on stage to talk to them. But time, planning and logistics often conspire against this. I’ve given plenty of pre-concert talks where I’ve never met the performer. I wish it weren’t the case, but there it is. So we are trying, sometimes against rather unhelpful odds, to draw that connection between words and performance.

Last but not least, we are the creators of the thing that will most likely serve as your enduring physical reminder of the evening: the programme. I still have (and from time to time, re-read) programmes for every concert I’ve been to since the late 1990s. So we writers make something which can be as ephemeral as the concert itself – straight in the bin on the way out – or as enduring as your memory of it. It’s a privilege to produce such things, and we do so with you, the audience, at the forefront of our minds. So spare a thought for us, now and then. We are thinking of you with every word we write.

Katy Hamilton is a freelance researcher, writer and presenter on music.

www.katyhamilton.co.uk

Twitter: @klhamilton

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A guest post by Charles Morgan Lines

“There are two components to conducting, expressiveness and exactness. These two components are in dialectical opposition to each other; in fact, they cancel each other out. A conductor must find the way to bring the two together.”

Ilya Aleksandrovich Musin, Conductor Maker

Ilya Musin (1906 to 1999) was a Russian conductor and renowned teacher of conductors. His identification of the paradox that lies at the heart of the art of conducting, the need to be both expressive and exact in one’s communication with the orchestra, is of immense significance, for not only conductors but also others who want to develop and utilise their skills to an exceptional level.

Exceptional performance within any sphere requires the ability to be both exact and expressive in our actions, to be technically reliable, accurate and consistent, and uniquely expressive, imaginative and creative. The best soccer players, golfers and tennis players can not only execute their skills perfectly time after time, but also combine and use them in new and unexpected ways that enhance their performance and surprise and delight their audiences. Think of Messi and his visionary passing, Ballesteros and his gift of recovery around the greens, Federer and his ability to wrong foot his opponents with unexpected shots and angles; they can not only execute their skills accurately and consistently but also find ways to express their personal style and uniqueness through their sport.

Many highly successful scientists are not only technically rigorous but also uniquely creative, imaginative and even playful in their approaches, again able to express their personal style and uniqueness through their vocation (Galileo and his imaginative and playful experiments, Einstein and his memorable and engaging thought experiments, and Richard Feynman and his creative and practical lectures).

So, how can we all work towards achieving and combining the exactness and expressiveness that leads to exceptional performance? The first thing to make clear is that it takes time and disciplined effort. For most of us it takes about ten years to achieve the fluency of thought and action that is an essential requirement for top level performance. Having said this, appreciating how the two dimensions of expressiveness and exactness interact with each other can act as a helpful springboard, providing the impetus for our initial and on-going efforts.
Exactness relates to our ability to execute our skills, apply our knowledge and use our experience. If we are low in exactness we will find it difficult to execute our skills, apply our knowledge and use our experience consistently, efficiently and effectively. If we are high in exactness we will more easily be able to execute our skills, apply our knowledge and use our experience consistently, efficiently and effectively.

Expressiveness relates to our ability to express our unique perceptions and preferences and demonstrate the blend of skills and attitudes that constitute our personal style. If we are low in expressiveness we will find it difficult to express our unique perceptions and preferences and demonstrate the blend of skills and attitudes that constitute our personal style. If we are high in expressiveness we will more easily be able to express our unique perceptions and preferences and demonstrate the blend of skills and attitudes that constitute our personal style.

These two dimensions of exactness and expressiveness can be combined to create the above matrix, which can be used to inform and support the development of our skills and the personal style we use to deliver them.

The matrix consists of four quadrants:

The beginner quadrant is where we are at the beginning of our journey towards mastery of our skills and acquisition of our personal style. We are low in exactness and expressiveness. We do not have the skills, knowledge and experience we need and therefore lack the confidence to express ourselves and develop our personal style. Key to moving out of this quadrant is successfully identifying and taking those first few crucial steps that will help us begin to develop the skills and gain the knowledge, experience and confidence we need.

The loose cannon quadrant is where we are if expressing ourselves within our chosen field comes easily but reliable and consistent execution of its technicalities does not. We are high in expressiveness and low in exactness. We possess a personal style that needs to be polished; others commonly perceive us as possessing a ‘natural but raw talent’. We are capable of flashes of insight and brilliance but they are unpredictable and unreliable. We do not know how we succeed at things and so we find it hard to replicate those successes as and when needed. Key to moving out of this quadrant is to identify and focus on our key strengths and attributes, find out precisely why and how they work and then practise these aspects until we can call upon them at will, so ensuring consistent and effective execution. We also need to try out these aspects and approaches in different contexts to identify when they are most and least appropriate and/or effective.

The technician quadrant is where we are if we can execute our skills and apply our knowledge within our chosen field accurately, consistently and effectively, but whilst doing so we find it difficult to express ourselves individually, imaginatively and creatively. We are high in exactness and low in expressiveness. We need to identify and develop a personal style. We may be perceived as reliable and a ‘safe pair of hands’ but not a ‘star performer’ capable of delivering brilliant and unique ideas and performance. Key to moving out of this quadrant is moving away from our comfort zones and the usual or generally accepted ways of doing things. We need to explore differing approaches and ways of doing things and identify those that intrigue us, appeal to us and perhaps even positively challenge us the most. We then, through experiment and practice, need to fine tune and blend them to create our unique style, our unique way of going about our chosen work.

The maestro quadrant is where we are if we can execute our skills and apply our knowledge consistently and effectively and in doing so express ourselves individually, imaginatively and creatively. We are high in exactness and high in expressiveness. We possess a mature and evolving personal style. We are likely to be perceived as someone who can suggest different and insightful ways of looking at things and effectively implement innovative ways of doing things. We are the people organisations and businesses rely on to create their competitive edge and help them become acknowledged leaders in their fields. Key to staying in this quadrant is battling complacency. We need to continue growing and developing our skills, knowledge and experience. We need to seek out new and exciting challenges. We need to make a habit of seeking and acting upon feedback. Lastly, and arguably most importantly, we need to reinforce our own skills through helping to develop those of others.

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Charles M Lines trained as a musician and studied composition at the Colchester School of Music during the early 1980s. He joined the UK Civil Service in 1984 where he worked for various government departments, eventually specialising in management consultancy, training and development. In 1996 he became a Senior Lecturer at the UK Civil Service College.

At the age of 41 he left the Civil Service to work as an independent management consultant and trainer. He has since been in demand both at home and abroad, providing management consultancy and training events to a very wide range of clients.

He speaks and writes regularly about creative problem solving and how music’s creative principles and practices can help us all be more creative in our approach to life and work. Charles is the author of ‘Creativity in the Air: Fifty Ways Music Can Make You More Creative’ and also writes the Creativity in the Air blog

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Guest post by Simon Brackenborough

It’s safe to say that I was never a conventional teenager. Some time around the age of 15 or 16, while my peers were obsessed with Radiohead, I discovered a profound affinity with the music of half-forgotten British composer Arnold Bax (1883-1953). I became absorbed in his epic symphonies, chamber music and tone poems. So In 2003, aged 18, I wrote to the then director of the BBC Proms to ask why a Bax symphony hadn’t been programmed for the 50th anniversary of his death. His reply was that the last time one had had a Proms performance, the attendance had been one of the lowest in memory. His memory, that is: the fateful Prom was in 1984, a few months before I was born.

Arnold Bax

Many classical fans have their own favourite neglected composers, or works of music that haven’t received their fair due. In most cases we rarely, if ever, get chances to hear them performed live. And yet at the same time, we live in a golden age for access to recorded music. Thanks to YouTube, there is now more classical music available to hear than you could listen to in a lifetime, much of it by composers you’ve never heard of, and all for free.

But taking time to explore this amazing resource can be a daunting prospect, and that’s why last year I started a blog specifically to share some of this rarely-performed music with a wider audience, and explain why it means something to me. But I don’t want to argue that Bax or anyone else join an elite canon of great composers. Mostly I avoid the whole concept: the words ‘great’ and ‘masterpiece’, while fine as expressions of admiration, are actually some of the least informative descriptions you can give. In fact, they are often a way of not exploring what the music means.

The idea of timeless ‘greatness’ is also ahistorical. Even Bach’s music needed a revival in the nineteenth century. However proud we may be of our discerning ears, we all underestimate the role that expectations play in our perceptions, and studies have shown this to be the case from art to wine tasting. That isn’t to deny that some works have a wide and enduring appeal, but it is to acknowledge that music can be different things to different people at different times, and for different reasons. And this is no bad thing: in fact, I argue, it opens up a much more interesting conversation to have with new listeners.

Because – crucially – we need to look at the current marginalisation of so many brilliant and individual composers as a microcosm of the bigger marginalisation of classical music within society. Both are symptoms of a failure to fully realise, and adequately express, the basic relevance of the music. That’s why I believe that if we can invite the public to hear a Bax symphony, by finding ways to engage them in who he was and what makes his music distinctive, we will increase the pool of listeners who come to hear Beethoven too.

It’s not about whether enough people will like Bax. But by confidently confronting the question of why he produces both obsessive fans and sniffy detractors, you have exactly the opportunity to engage people that the Proms should have seized with both hands. Disagreement, after all, is a sign that an art form matters: a repertoire of limited risk is a repertoire of limited relevance. The industry will be in a healthier place when concert-goers are less sure that they will enjoy the experience, but are willing to pay to find out.

There’s no doubt in my mind that there’s a huge untapped curiosity about classical music in the wider population, but with busy lives, listeners need to be given a route in. The success of the TED movement shows a popular hunger for learning which can be met with a smart, co-ordinated effort to feed that curiosity. Similarly encouraging is that my two most recent blog posts, looking at music through the theme of St. George’s Day and natural wildness, both had a great response from people who are not classical fans, but for whom I offered a musical connection to subjects they were already interested in. And in these contexts, an obscure composer can be just as relevant and revealing as any other.

A lateral, interdisciplinary, magpie approach surely holds more fruitful opportunities for classical music than what I call the ‘connoisseur culture’– that rather cosy preoccupation with the finer points of interpretations of core repertoire which too often seems to be the default setting in parts of the music media. Even as a music graduate I find this cliquey and uninspiring, so goodness knows how new listeners must feel. Just look at the average concert brochure today, and how little information is given on why you might want to hear anything on offer. The assumed knowledge of the repertoire suggests an industry content with preaching to the converted.

Of course, I understand that there are commercial calculations in programming pieces that are proven to sell tickets and that performers are already familiar with. But the canon, like any hierarchy, is also a way of preserving the status quo, and the status quo always benefits those with power. For people at the top of the classical industry, unfamiliar repertoire challenges the expertise on which they have built their authority. Yet as the comic writer and lifelong classical listener Armando Iannucci observed in this fantastic speech to the Royal Philharmonic Society in 2006, new listeners are blessed by not knowing what is deemed to be worthy. I sometimes think we would be better off with people running the show who know nothing about the music at all.

If it were up to me, finding ways to connect people to the ideas and themes of the music would have a much bigger role in how performances are conceived and marketed; an over-priced concert programme that you have to read in a hurry just doesn’t cut it. A good example of a step in the right direction was the heavily-conceptualised The Rest Is Noise festival at London’s South Bank Centre. Discussion of themes can even form part of the event itself, as with the Orpheus Sinfonia’s ‘Beneath the Score’ concerts, which combine biography and analysis with performance. But these forward-thinking examples are still too rare.

Steve Jobs once said of his rival Bill Gates that ‘he’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.’ Now I’m no Apple-worshipper, but it’s clear that their phenomenal success is not just down to computer science, but understanding aesthetics, intuitive design, and consumer psychology. In contrast, we have a classical music industry that produces incredible musicians but is pretty woeful at telling the world why all their years of training, and all the amazing music they play, actually has anything to say. Even worse, it often doesn’t seem to care.

Of course I’m not the first person to make these sorts of arguments, and I won’t be the last. I particularly recommend this typically insightful post from the excellent On An Overgrown Path blog, contrasting the growth of Mahler’s popularity with that of ever-neglected Malcolm Arnold. But the arguments need continual revisiting, reconsidering, and refreshing. Because too often, classical music looks like it’s stuck in a dead-end job: one of comfortable routine that just about pays the bills, but whose narrow scope and dull repetition prevents any hope of reaching something greater.

Perhaps, in fact, the classical music world is sometimes guilty of forgetting just what an amazing resource a musical score is. Each one is a repository of years of learning, soul-searching and toil, and yet look at how we treat them – the majority gather dust while a select few grow dog-eared through overuse. This is nothing short of an artistic tragedy. The fact that scores are the starting point for classical music is what makes the art form so special, and it’s vital that they are at the heart of where it goes next.

That does not mean that all pieces offer something equally compelling. But, to borrow from George Orwell, it is to remind us that each reflects a composer seeing, feeling, hearing, and understanding the world. Quite simply, for every artist who lies forgotten we miss a unique perspective of what it means to be human; our culture carries one mind less, one world less. That is the essential truth that classical music needs to remember in order to thrive. We’re all here just trying to make sense of being alive. And through the incredible richness and diversity of our music, that’s all we should be trying to do.

Simon Brackenborough is a music graduate, currently living in Hampshire, and author of the Corymbus blog which has a special focus on neglected or little-known repertoire and composers.

https://corymbus.wordpress.com/