Friday, October 4, 2013

No, Musicians Are Not Just Having Fun


It has happened again: amidst the battles between orchestras and management, the peanut gallery has piped in with the wearisome refrain that musicians get paid too much for doing what they enjoy. In his Telegraph article, "US Orchestras are Greedy and Overpaid," Ivan Hewitt glibly asks, "Why does a musician need to be 'compensated' for doing what he/she loves?" (Perhaps Hewitt abhors writing and secretly yearns to be a dentist.)

Never mind that Hewitt slaps musicians with the Protestant work ethic while Millennial entrepreneurs crow ceaselessly of the fun they have following their "passions" from the beanbag chairs at Google, and getting filthy rich in the process. Never mind that teenage entertainers of questionable talent earn enough in one year to fund the Minnesota Orchestra's new lobby. Never mind that the average orchestra salaries Hewitt mentions roughly equal the average starting salary of every newly-minted, top-tier MBA. Never mind all of pro sports and all of finance--but wait, these comparisons are unfair, for those people all make money.

Fine for them, but is that how we determine all jobs' value? I'll refrain from pointing out that art, historically, has not been viewed as a commercial enterprise, and that the social value of plenty of well-paid jobs (judges, cops, teachers, etc., etc.) isn't measured in dollars accumulated. Nor will I link to any articles about how kids who listen to Mozart trounce your kid on every single math test and instinctually know how to do origami.

But I will point out that, much like the immense infrastructure of media workers and technology that brings a pop starlet's crotch-rubbing into your very own living room--you're welcome!--a lot of work goes into those orchestral concerts. Musicians love playing masterpieces at the top level under fantastic conductors. To get to that point, less-loved experiences include the daily hours of practice from an early age, the potential lack of developed social skills because of time spent practicing, the lack of dates due to lack of said social skills, the wholesale rejection of the fruits of this sacrifice by grumpy audition panels, the fact that musicians experience this rejection up to several times a month before becoming established, the lack of decent retirement savings because they lived on credit cards before landing the well-paying spot, the abuse of tyrannical conductors when you do land the "dream job," and most importantly, the indignity of being forced, somewhere along this trajectory, to do this:


So yes, the hour or two of performing is a blast. The lifetime of work it takes to get there, well, that feels much more like what is conventionally called "paying your dues". It is necessary, and the results are satisfying, but it's not a trip to the movies. There is no question that the current economic difficulties will necessitate many painful changes, but as we negotiate that unpleasant territory, let's not scapegoat those being hurt the most after they've given the most.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The Art of Talent Show Performance, and Why Classical Artistry is Different

I came across this video several weeks ago:


As I read through the comments of awed viewers, who admired Ms. Rigolo's precision, concentration, and artistry, I thought again about classical performing art forms from around the world--opera, ballet, kabuki, gamelan, in short, the art forms modern consumers usually call "boring". This video, very lengthy by internet standards, features nothing but a woman slowly balancing sticks upon each other until a large structure emerges, accompanied by meditative flute music. While videos of amazing ballet performances languish with merely hundreds of views, why does this balancing act sustain interest, why is it deemed artistic, and why is it so popular? And what can classical performing arts traditions learn from this?

It turns out that the artistic veneer masks a simple dramatic structure straight out of vaudeville. Media scholar Henry Jenkins, in his book The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, notes how performer-centric and modularly structured evenings of vaudeville acts often eschewed art or storytelling "to focus attention upon the performer's skills, having little or no other interest." But impressive tricks were not enough; a performer's chances of being rehired or paid better depended on the magnitude of the audience's reaction. A tried-and-true formula emerged: steady increases in suspense, up to the point of the "wow climax" or "big wow," the kicker at the end of the act that finally sends the crowd into wild applause. This video relies on exactly such a structure. The costs of failure rise with each successfully placed stick, culminating in the all-or-nothing final balancing of the entire structure on a vertical pole. The crowd goes wild, and Ms. Rigolo even adds what performers call a "button," an extra gesture after the big wow, when she underscores the structure's fragility by toppling it with the initial feather.

Conforming as it does to the standard structure of jugglers, acrobats, or daredevil stuntmen, it is easy to see why this video sustains a mass audience's attention. Yet to go viral online, it must also conform to the emerging laws of what makes something "sharable": it must not only please the viewer, but also be something the viewer will publicly "like" in front of hundreds of online friends. Though sharing online can, in theory, match the intimacy of real-life confidences, the fact remains that online sharing to an audience of hundreds (or thousands) prompts most of us to share items that grab attention, then reflect our desired online self-image. As Lee Siegel noted in a recent New York Times article, "Seeking Out Peer Pressure," the internet "prizes the cute angle, the startling factoid, the arch provocation, qualities that are actually the careful, calculated style of the other-directed person cannily hiding behind an inner-directed facade."

Ms. Rigolo's performance gave viewers multiple reasons to share. The serene aesthetic veneer atop the vaudeville act structure prompted commenters to not only voice their amazement, but also praise the artistry. One commenter even found an exploration of deeper themes, in "the power of one feather in the end." The harmony achieved among the movement, pace, music, and props struck many viewers as artsy, beautiful, or even elevating the display to the level of "performance art". Thus, the video can be shared as any or all of those things. Furthermore, the performance requires no specialized knowledge of artistic forms or traditions to be perceived as artistic, something many traditional performing disciplines cannot so easily claim. The sharer can thus rest assured of reaching the widest possible audience.

Where performing traditions differ
Those already familiar with a classical performing art form can probably already see ways in which those arts diverge from the principles that made this video a success.

First, there's no two ways about it: to understand a classical performance of whatever tradition, at least some specialized knowledge of the tradition is required. Ms. Rigolo's balancing act can appeal widely because everyone can immediately and intuitively understand the difficulty of what she's doing. In classical arts, some aspects of performance share the same immediacy (a pianist playing prestissimo or a soprano's high C), but many don't--many people don't even realize, for example, that opera singers do not use microphones--a fact that makes their singing significantly more impressive.

On top of that, classical performers cannot merely execute difficult maneuvers and hope for applause. Playing "merely" technically well is an insult. Audience interest is sustained through any combination of precision, virtuosity, character, emotional communication, or a sense of taste, and again, understanding how these elements come together, which combinations work and which don't, which are surprising and which passé, requires a gradually acquired audience knowledge of the tradition in question. The uninitiated often find it difficult-to-impossible to follow a performance, and if they're not willing to explore something new that evening, boredom often results.

But mentioning dramatic trajectories brings up another major issue: within themselves and compared with each other, classical performances embrace an infinite diversity of forms. Some value steadily building suspense; some don't. Some embrace climax and emotional outbursts, while others shun them for meditative contemplation of the infinite. The vaudeville form seen in this video came from a specific time, and was calculated to be exciting, not necessarily meaningful. It was a pragmatic form evolved to create a big applause moment at the moment when (as Jenkins points out) the manager would peek around the curtain to see whether to rehire the act. Regardless of the wow climax's artistic potential, it is simply one form among thousands. In classical arts, meaning is important, and the form is often implicitly or explicitly chosen to help convey this meaning. The audience must be knowledgeable and curious about formal possibilities.

Conclusions
When I first watched this, I imagined arts organizations debating whether this video showed evidence of an audience potentially ready for, say, symphony concerts. For me, it's clear that the differences are too great; understanding why this video holds a mass audience's attention allows you to understand why they won't immediately look for a seven-and-a-half minute ballet pas de deux video next. This deepens my conviction that arts marketing needs to distinguish itself from popular media marketing, not ape it, because the experiences are fundamentally different.

Furthermore, many of today's popular marketing books recommend a focus on customers who will do the proselytizing for you--call them early adopters, sneezers, or whatever. The focus should not be on pop culture lovers who already hold negative impressions of classical art forms. I've read a few articles of the "Think opera is old-fashioned? Think again!" variety lately, and all suffer the same delusion: if a sexy lady can sell Coke, she can sell tickets to Carmen. Yet no one complains of always wanting to go to the symphony, but feeling repelled the cellist wasn't model-skinny. While current marketing trends revolve around building relationships, classical music marketing still seems stuck in thinking that getting attention is the end of the game, not the very beginning. We citizens see billions of advertising images per year; we are masters at ignoring things. People don't respond to sexy pop idol posters because of the sex; they respond because they know the singer's name and have a relationship with that "brand". If I don't already have some brand affinity for your opera company or whichever show you're performing, a push-up bra isn't going to sell me.

Instead, arts organizations should be searching vigorously for their "early adopters". Plenty of us have friends or relatives who may not be symphony subscribers, but feel dissatisfied with the commercialization and banality of today's popular culture. Many of these surely have some curiosity about classical art forms, but sexy headshots won't win them over. Increasing this curiosity effectively should be the first priority.

Ultimately, this is extremely important for all art lovers, especially lovers of traditional performance forms. The depth of meaning found in these forms can, perhaps, be rivaled by popular culture at its best, but never surpassed. Along with depth of meaning, traditional forms are irreplaceable windows into countries, cultures, or languages. Deep and real artistic experiences, furthermore, are inherently personal. Art inspires that old-fashioned type of sharing, of vulnerably giving others glimpses of your deeper self. In the end, these are worth more than ten million views.

Monday, March 4, 2013

The "Relevance" of Opera: Let's Define Relevance

Reports about new Universal Music CEO Max Hole's views on classical music's future launched another round of debate about classical music's relevance. Many raised excellent points; many others recycled inaccurate and unhelpful clichés as justification for either modernization or preservation, such as tales of old-fashioned and stuffy symphonic halls, intimidating clapping etiquette, and the superiority of live video in engaging fans. Though supposedly all steering toward a future of greater relevance, commenters displayed wildly different assumptions about what that even means. With so many paddling in opposite directions, it's no wonder classical arts are as stuck as ever in unsustainable models.

Discussion of the arts' future, whether by Mr. Hole or others, often make a dubious link between 'relevance' and ticket sales, scrutinizing top-selling musical acts for strategies orchestras might employ. Rarely is it asked whether the tactics which generate high ticket-sales for Lady Gaga should, or even could, generate ticket sales for orchestras and opera companies. Mr. Hole describes, among other things, how he'd like to "jump on [his] feet and shout and yell" for Beethoven, but alas, protocol forbids this. So let's say we take his advice and loosen up: does following his implications to a future of commemorative-t-shirt-clad teens tweeting and texting about Christian Tetzlaff seem like a plausible trajectory for classical music? Importing the trappings and protocol of arena concerts won't change the fact that the triggers for excessive spending on Bieber memorabilia simply may not exist in the classical world.

When music execs complain of a lack of emotion shown by orchestras or a lack of Jumbotrons magnifying a conductor's minutest exertions, they show the same lack of imagination that Stephen Fry criticized in his eloquent defense of classical music. They can't imagine people enjoying 200-year-old music with no visual aspect, so instead they catalogue the differences between the symphony and the Celine Dion Spectacular, and call that a path to classical music's salvation. And this is hardly a surprise, given their usual lack of exposure. Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating recently sounded off that most politicians have not had a meaningful moment with the arts, emphasizing that the way to appreciate music is to spend time with it, one-on-one, as a listener or a performer. Background music doesn't cut it: real art requires real concentration. Mr. Hole himself claims to have liked the "bits" of classical music he's heard. Are "bits" enough to convey the grandeur of any art form?

To discuss the arts' relevance to today's audiences, we first need to understand entertainment commodities and artistic experiences as wholly distinct entities.

The use of the word "audience" is already a clue. Audience can simply mean the group of people watching something, but it can also be used to indicate a brewing mob mentality, as in, "The audience demands blood." Many of Mr. Hole's suggestions assume this second sense, where the audience is hostile, doesn't want to be there, and needs to be convinced that what they are about to see and hear might have value. But art shouldn't be about convincing the hostile that they haven't wasted their time; it should be about great work, and that's it. I know nothing about jazz, but if I go see the greatest jazz guitarist in the world, I'm not going to berate him for failing to teach me the basics instead of transporting the people who actually know a thing or two about the art form.

But an entertaining TV show is supposed to do exactly that, which is one major difference between art and entertainment media. Whatever you know and feel at the beginning of a TV episode, by the end, you should feel better and have a general sense of the characters and plot lines. Performing this service better and faster gets people to choose a show over its competitors, and it survives in the marketplace. The audience gets its itch scratched and the show's producers cash in: win-win. In other words, an entertainment commodity's 'relevance' to an audience absolutely involves ticket sales (or the equivalent), as the audience is paying for a fairly well-defined service.

Art does no such thing. It needn't make you feel better (though it often does), it needn't inform you of anything (though it often does)--it need only be good art. Rather than debate what art should or should not be, suffice it to say that the collective definitions, from the broadest to the most personal, greatly exceed the dual tasks of captivating minds and improving moods. Great art forms possess infinite depth: the more you learn and appreciate, the more you realize you have yet to explore. I love Homeland as much as anyone, but admit it doesn't quite make me feel that way.

Art's relevance, then, comes from this place of infinite depth, of its ability to be so many things to so many people. Great art opens itself to anyone, absolutely anyone, who seeks it. Whether its seekers number too few to make art a valuable addition to Mr. Hole's portfolio says nothing about relevance, just marketability. Though funding the arts is indeed a major obstacle, I remain unconvinced that wannabe copycatting of the wealthy entertainment world will build the audiences classical arts need to survive intact.

Monday, February 11, 2013

The Voice Within the Voice

There is a memorable line in David Mitchell's novel, Cloud Atlas, when a fugitive human clone, Sonmi-451, is taken to the "facescaper," ne plus ultra of plastic surgeons, to alter her well-known cloned features. This particular facescaper is regarded as the best in the business, which she attributes to her ability to "see the face within the face." I thought of this recently when trying to describe a quality which I believe many of the most memorable voices have: they reveal the "voice within the voice".

This is the voice beyond the meaning of the words spoken and beyond the aesthetic qualities of the voice heard. In his excellent monograph, A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar calls this the "object voice,"  and delineates the two ways we lose or mask it: either we over-focus upon what a person is saying (the message), or we over-focus on the quality of the sound, as when we listen to a singer (the aesthetics). Both paths lead us to miss the object voice, which becomes completely covered by sound or meaning.

We seem aware that the voices have the power to affect our minds independent of text and aesthetics, and we can see this power in examples from religious or mystical rituals to fiction and Hollywood. Call-and-response patterns in a ceremony, especially with a well-known text, let us feel how vocal sound can penetrate the mind when text has lost all surprise, but beauty of sound has no relevance. To be affected by an outside voice makes us aware of voices' special access to our psyches, to comfort but also to hurt or control. In the sci-fi novel Dune, a caste of witch-nuns called the Bene Gesserit study the psychoacoustic properties of voice in such detail that they can use "the Voice," a special way of speaking which allows one to control the listener like a puppet. No less disturbing are the real cases of schizophrenics powerless to resist the demands of voices in their heads.

Horror movies' numerous demonic possessions, and even Gandalf showing his otherworldly side, use technological tricks to depict this excess of voice beyond sound and meaning, where the voice itself can command power over others. Perhaps it is necessary to alter the actor's voice electronically or by mixing it with another actor's voice because, as Dolar suggests, the excess of voice over sound and meaning is also its excess over and separation from the body. David Lynch depicts this in one of my favorite scenes from Lost Highway, where the Mystery Man has literally too many voices, but also a voice which exceeds the bounds of time and space.

What about voice divorced from body completely? A famous example of this uncanny effect, which Dolar cites in his book, is the mother's voice in Psycho:
[Think] of Hitchcock's Psycho, which revolves entirely around the question "Where does the mother's voice come from? To which body can it be assigned? We can immediately see that a voice without a body is inherently uncanny, and that the body to which it is assigned does not dissipate its haunting effect. (p. 61)
Horror movies also frequently use this "voice without a body" trope (Dolar's book, incidentally, is where I found the title for this blog) in menacing phone calls. Imagine the lack of chills had the opening of Scream been filmed this way instead, or handled via text message.

In music, both technique and technology can be used not just to amplify the voice, conform to a style, or create innovative sound colors (this would keep us within the aesthetic dimension of the voice), but to amplify this sense of the voice's excess over body, and thus give us a peek at the object voice. In The Knife and another solo project, Fever Ray, singer and composer Karin Dreijer Andersson often uses extensive electronic processing of her vocals, the goal being, according to interviews, is to remove the audience's identification with a personality via the voice; ironically, Karin's voice (with or without processing) is the most striking thing about her records. Selective and creative use of electronic processing not only provides aesthetic variety, but creates a mutating voice which belongs to no one. Another famous Anderson made her career in the early 80’s on the same insight: clever and targeted use of technology can create an overall context in which even the plain spoken voice no longer sounds everyday.

The great vocal traditions of the world, of course, had no such technological resources to create a mutating voice, and draw very real boundaries of style which may seem to contrast with the supposedly limitless colors electronic processing can achieve. How is it that vocal technique might also reveal the voice within the voice? Horkheimer and Adorno write:
In every work of art, style is a promise. In being absorbed through style into the dominant form of universality, into the current musical, pictorial, or verbal idiom, what is expressed seeks to be reconciled with the idea of the true universal. This promise of the work of art to create truth by impressing its unique contours on the socially transmitted forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical.... Yet it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering. The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality cannot indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 103)
I believe a similar point should be made about the voice: in the "passionate striving" for mastery of a vocal style, a the "discrepancy" of the object voice emerges, and "what is expressed" can be recognized with the idea of the "true universal," a voice within the voice. This implies two things:

First, dilettantism is impossible. While technical perfection, stylistic purity, or other "questionable [unities] of form and content" cannot be the whole goal, the performer's "passionate striving for identity" must include fidelity and respect to the tradition. If a singer stops practicing and declares himself "good enough," this is not a "necessary failure" but a chosen one. There should instead be no end to the striving.

Second, the limits of commercialized music become clear. Passionate striving to attain mastery of a style, as just noted, is about trying and failing for perfection, about Martha Graham's "queer, divine dissatisfaction". Neither the logic of selling infinitely more nor the logic of having sold enough can motivate this passion; striving for commercial success is about commerce, not art. It may be satisfying and one may be good at it, but it's not divine. 

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

The Best Online Introduction to Opera

Just a brief post to say that if you're someone interested in learning more about opera, YouTube is a treasure trove of mind-blowing singing performances. The best education in opera appreciation is to listen to a lot of great singers and see what you like, what you start to notice, etc.

To that end, one of the best YouTube channels created by any opera fan belongs to Onegin65. Check it out here. With almost 60 million views to date, he/she must be doing something right!

Friday, January 18, 2013

Why is "Nessun Dorma" on Every Talent Show on Planet Earth?

There have been countless amateur renditions of "Nessun Dorma" on TV talent shows across the world, and this phenomenon perplexes me. How is it that the wider public goes crazy for these performances, but cares little for professional classical music? I cannot believe that so many people who enjoy Paul Pott's "Nessun Dorma" would not enjoy Franco Corelli's.

For better or worse, American Idol, X-Factor, and [Insert Country]'s Got Talent rule television ratings around the globe. You don't attain that level of success without knowing what you're selling, and this product includes a healthy rotation of unpolished dreamers who dream to perform classical music. This is what I'm talking about. Whether tackling "Nessun Dorma" or a few other purely classical (as opposed to crossover) pieces, the spectacle of amateur classical singers doing their best sells well. Real classical tickets sell poorly.

So how can this be? 

Issue #1: "Nessun Dorma" as a moment instead of a piece of music, or, Does Anyone Actually Listen To Paul Potts Sing?

Here's the first obvious thing I missed: "Nessun Dorma" on these shows doesn't lead to stampedes at the opera box office because it is not a performance of opera.

Yes, these shows need good personal interest stories, cathartic moments, triumphs, embarrassments, struggle, heroes, and villains. This sounds exactly like opera, but these components are primarily produced in the TV studio and editing room, not through music itself. The values of classical music--commitment to a beautiful sound, attention to detail, expert control of technique for singers and instrumentalists, etc.--don't really support the needs of entertaining commercial television. Instead we have the familiar camera angles, the shots of judges' faces shifting from skepticism to amazement, and the endless standing ovations of the crowd, all meticulously arranged into a TV segment with the dramatic emotional journey the audience came to see.

Both the live and home audiences get satisfaction, but it's not because of music. If you really care about a musical moment, you don't scream during it; you listen.

Issue #2: Disinterest in musical values, or, Let Me Like What I Like

Everyone who has studied classical singing has experienced this: you board a plane home for Thanksgiving, you mention to your friendly neighboring passenger that you study singing, and now manners dictate that you must pretend to kind of like Josh Groban.

Because we've also experienced this: people become peeved if we say we don't really find these talents that amazing. While we've been holed up in a practice room or music library, most people have learned from commercial music that you like what you like, you get to buy what you like, and those who disagree with you are disparaging your taste, and thus your freedom (to buy). We then emerge from the music academy with several degrees in hand to find that even if people claim to want our opinion on a singer like Potts, direct criticism based on our accumulated knowledge gets branded as "snobby" no matter how delicately it's phrased. Musicians thus learn when to hide the fact that they're educated at all.

The problem here is that when trained musicians judge these talent show performances, they do so relative to musical principles, while the wider audience tends to do so relative to the principles of entertainment commodities. Serious music lovers evaluate whether the musical components came together to produce artistry. The wider audience cares more about whether the moment was exciting, the singer looked impassioned, the high note was surmounted, and the audience overwhelmed--in short, whether they've been watching good TV. My musical critique thus covers principles quite literally irrelevant to most folks' appreciation of a performance, but my dislike of Potts registers and becomes a slam against a moment they enjoyed. It's taken personally.

Issue #3: Repetition vs. relationship

With little free time to waste, entertainment seekers want guarantees that they'll enjoy themselves. The performances on these shows are commodities that come in packaging as standardized as a Coke's, so we know what we're getting and that we're going to like it, and also that everyone else is getting the same thing. There's a lot of comfort in that. As a result, the question is not whether so-and-so is a competent singer with potential, but whether we were entertained. If the current talent entertained us, as Susan Boyle did for many, then it's ready for mass distribution now, unchanged except for the perfunctory makeover.

Listening based on musical principles comes from a desire to understand music and have a relationship with it. We want to know what a singer's strengths are, how she develops as an artist over time, and what new things her voice may be capable of in the future. We want to know how she uses vocal sound to communicate inarticulable truths. A thoughtful relationship over time with an artist, a style, or even a single work is a necessary part of appreciation for all art, and like all relationships, there may be rough spots, things you don't understand, frustrations. It's not entertaining, but it's infinitely rewarding. The classical music of many cultures requires this commitment.

The point is that as consumers of entertainment, we don't want what classical music is: we want repetition over relationship. When I go see most new science fiction movies, I'm really hoping I get to watch The Matrix for the first time all over again. Should someone criticize technical components of The Matrix, informed by a deep love of and relationship with film as an art form, it matters little to me; I just want my show. Ergo, the opera world isn't scooping up hoards of new "Nessun Dorma" converts because nothing in the enjoyment of that aria on TV has prepares one for a relationship with classical music. It prepares them to watch more TV and buy the CD in stores as a kind of souvenir.

Coda: What is an arts organization to do?

I've long been perplexed that various kinds of classical singing seem so resistant to commercial appropriation. The power of commerce to market anything, combined with the internet's ability to find and mine the most specialized of niches, should be easy to wield for anyone trying to either build a commercially relevant classical music audience or develop and market new music based on classical traditions. Instead, big symphonies struggle to hold onto their (literally) dying base, and virtually no contemporary commercial music makes direct use of true classical technique.

I think the above goes a long way toward showing why. To gather new audiences, we need to convince the uninitiated that a relationship with classical music (and this holds true of many other art forms) is worth the time and effort. Embarrassing Hollywood-style ad campaigns in an attempt to be "relevant" don't do this, and in fact insinuate the opposite: opera can be just as slick and disposable as that trash in the multiplex! Instead, we should focus on activities that invite and allow people to start their own relationship to opera. I recently read of opera singers giving a free concert in a park, only to have their company's next show sell out of tickets. This is a perfect example of preparing an audience: let them decide on their own that live, beautiful and professional singing is something they enjoy, then invite them for more.

Let's stop marketing opera as what it's not, and start showing it for what it truly is. It has nothing to do with Paul Potts on TV; that is about entertainment, and people should be free to entertain themselves however they choose. Real art in music is something that needs and includes you within it, builds a relationship with you, and gives you lifelong nourishment. Let's help more people find that.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

What We Praise When We Praise a Child's Singing

Consider the following two videos:

These two videos have both gone around the web a lot over the past few years. Both seem to be viewed mostly positively. Both performances seem well practiced and rehearsed; but they show radically different sides of children's singing.

In the first case, we have an 11-year-old girl wailing away in what seems to be an exact facsimile of some adult singer's rendition of the song. We get growls and big sounds, belted high notes, and we are amazed that she is only eleven! What might time bring? But all is not well: many trained singers will tell you that the way this very talented girl mimics adult sounds is not particularly healthy. Moreover, if she sounds so "adult" now, which we praise, how will she sound when she's 30? Will she sound 75? Will she sound the same? Is either choice likely to be satisfying?

On the other hand, we have a 14-year-old boy accurately sing through a coloratura opera aria, and he sounds exactly like a 14-year-old boy soprano. The piece is rangy and difficult, with runs and staccato notes and some chromatic harmony, and YouTube commenters mostly show amazement at his skill. How will he sound when he's 30? Nothing like he sounds now, for certain, but we can guess he'll still sing in tune, in tempo, and with energy, which should serve him well in any style he chooses to sing.

These two videos catch us applauding child performers for totally different reasons, and this difference tells us a good bit about how singing is often perceived and interpreted today.

We applaud Bianca's precocious vocal talent, but what exactly impresses us? We're not applauding any openness of communication beyond her years, or a genuinely moving performance, but the fact that her singing sounds unnaturally grown up. She's an amazing mimic, and she clearly has the pipes and musicianship to mimic convincingly, but this becomes the focus at the expense of actual music. Later in that same season she takes on "Piece of My Heart" by Janis Joplin. It sounds, again, impressively like the original, but it's unsettling to watch this 11-year-old girl sing of "how a woman can be tough".

To be fair, Robin Schlotz taking on Mozart's Queen of the Night in her big vengeance aria could also be thought inappropriate; the big difference lies in how we interpret his sound. We get no delight from how much he sounds like a real operatic soprano, but because he's able to maintain good principles of singing--accurate rhythm and pitch, a healthy sound, good phrasing--through a technically difficult piece. When we applaud, we applaud skill alone. Now Bianca also has musical skill--but if she sang merely accurately, the applause would not have been so rapturous.

Another way you could phrase this: Robin's voice cannot convincingly mimic the sound of a commodity, while Bianca's can. In other words, Bianca not only sounds like an adult, she sounds like a recordable and marketable adult. Robin sounds like a boy, so no amount of talent can make him ready for the adult marketplace. 

You can see in this situation how much decades of listening to a so-called music "industry" affects how people interpret singing. The singing called "good" is the singing most like already-produced recent commercial and pop music. If Disney Channel graduate Nick Jonas doesn't have the technique to sing Les Miserables, people still defend his singing because they can recognize the sound of his pop albums in his attempted Broadway belt. Good singing is singing that sounds like a commercial record we already have. And more and more, technology can pick up the slack for singers with uneven, weak, or even out-of-tune voices. In other words, it can help bad singers sound like preexisting pop music. It can make the bad singers into good singers. 

This is unhealthy for the singing field in general. Bianca Ryan's very real talent requires discussion of the mechanics of her success, including the unhealthy components, to be truly perceived. Robin's talent can only be perceived through such discussion. Without reference to some kind of principles of singing, principles independent of the commercial music world, the public's ability to evaluate and thus appreciate talented singers will continue to erode.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

The Orphaned Voice

Like many "traditional" art forms, especially those formerly called "high art," opera singing suddenly finds itself lost. Traditionalists excoriate the larger culture, which they claim doesn’t appreciate opera; experimentalists chastise opera for being out-of-date and too confining; populists criticize opera’s supposed elitism and irrelevance for “normal” folks. No one knows what to do with it.

Many issues receiving a lot of attention and analysis in the art and aesthetic worlds today--the body, language, text, technology, media--interface awkwardly with the operatic voice, which somehow resists assimilation. Operatic singing is to sound effortless and free, while much body and performance art depicts the body straining itself, fatiguing itself, failing itself. As for language and text, lots of modern theatrical or poetic work demands either a clarity that operatic singing cannot deliver, with its tendency to mush words, or direct reference to different modes of spoken language, which operatic technique obliterates. The tension with technology is clear: in the world of sound, acoustic and amplified sound seem diametrically opposed. Visual technology and media work off of recorded or amplified sound and image, again in opposition to the values of acoustic music and live theater, and as for internet art, networks, and other digital-world topics--what could a soprano with tons of vibrato have to say about that?

This awkwardness often leads to operatic singing's exclusion from cutting edge work; on the rare occasions it does appear, it usually signifies a past time, a lost art, something out-of-date and not part of today's world. In fact, it seems as if opera as a stand-in for the idea of Spectacle or Grandiosity appears in contemporary art more than actual operatic singing itself. 

Conservative new works, on the other hand, have no problem using traditional operatic singing. As if most of the aesthetic and intellectual innovations of the 20th century (let alone the 21st) never happened, many operas being commissioned in the U.S. today take a great book (The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, certainly something off of the AP Humanities reading list), then set that text to big sung numbers with soaring lines, some more and some less tonal, seemingly in the pursuit of creating something with the form of a Major Work. Oddly, this seems also to foreground the spectacle and grandiosity of opera over the actual singing, because when a singer in such a piece unleashes her masterful crescendo to a blooming high note, she is fulfilling what we absolutely expect to be there. It is not that, as in Verdi's time, the public expects soaring high notes to be there because you always hear that in opera. It is that the public understands that the soaring high notes make this modern experience into an Opera, something higher and elevated. Therefore, should the soprano miss the note, we still get the shape and are more or less satisfied, because we still recognize our presence at an elevated cultural event. The form, and operatic singing's status as an emblem of that larger form, holds primary importance.


In neither case is the operatic voice, in its most basic and physical qualities, considered a sound that on its own has anything to do with today.

But perhaps the past indicates one way forward. Wordless singing, even now, needs no justification. Otherwise, how could so many bad pop songs with bad lyrics be so fun to sing along with? We don't really care what the words are, except perhaps in a very basic, primal sense in which it's fun to scream words like baby, fire, night. At opera's inception this was just as true, and the creation of opera involved a specific wager: the power of singing could be tethered to evening-length drama to create an even more affecting experience. The tension between music and words, often described as a battle, makes opera possible. Maybe the similar irreducible tension between the operatic voice and media, technology, or even today's conceptions of the body, could be used to forge one new pathway in music theater. 

For it is my feeling that microphones, video, and all the rest of it do not in any way reduce the need to have a developed kind of vocalism as at least one possible resource, if not the foundation of a form of theater. By developed vocalism, I mean something that requires intense and sustained training for years and years so that the singer can use his or her body in a way infinitely more refined than normal people. It is not insignificant to me that many of the world's most exalted forms of traditional theater had some kind of developed vocalism as a crucial part, nor that the world's most exalted singing styles are really hard to do well, even for singers trained in other styles.