The singing competition (not)

At the end of the singing competition I went to last week the chief judge got up to speak to the audience and give her feedback to the choirs. She told us how she refused to judge competitions but enjoyed coming to Norwich to judge this one because it wasn't a competition. The problem with competitions, apparently, is that they can be very discouraging when all the choirs really want is some constructive feedback.

And then came the feedback, which was constructive, followed by the results. One choir got 'Commended Performance Plus', another 'Highly Commended' and another achieved 'Highly Commended Performance Plus' while the remaining entrants were given one of these. No choir was deemed to have achieved 'Outstanding'. If the object of this was to allow a head teacher to stand up in assembly and tell the school how well their choir did in the Festival then it succeeds very well. No one has to say their choir was beaten by the school around the corner.

If, on the other hand, it hopes to disguise from the children how they got on in the 'not' competition then I'm afraid it may have failed. My daughter knew straight away that her choir came last. Dressing numbers up as words wasn't enough to pull the wool over her eyes. Fortunately it didn't seem to bother her or her fellow choristers - they were in it for the fun.

The hard knocks and disappointments in education are often defended as 'preparation for the adult world'. I'm very glad the open-mic sessions and mixed, cabaret-style, events I sometimes play at aren't judged in this way. Yes, the feedback may be useful but as for the rest, I know if it's gone well or badly and the audience usually gives a fair indication of that, too. And speaking of the audience, the troop from Suffolk, presumably with the fewest parents in attendance, were the most enthusiastically applauded in spite of only coming joint second.

Amazing music machine

A friend of mine sent me a video yesterday. It shows an amazing machine that sends balls, presumably using air pressure, in the manner of a tennis serving machine. These hit various pieces wood and metal and even strings to produce a very listenable jazz-rock score. According to the accompanying blurb the machine is made from components used in farm machinery, is displayed at the University of Iowa and is to be donated to the Smithsonian.

Watching a small image on my computer I was taken in for a while. It is still a wonderful piece of work and well worth watching but is actually a CGI animation. If you would like to see it in Real Player or similar send me your email (email me via my website if you'd prefer) and I'll send it on. It seems to be doing the rounds as a hoax so hopefully I'm not offending anybody's copyright.

It is a remarkable 'invention', makes jazz-rock accessible and will, I am sure, inspire some real instruments in a similar vein. Enjoy.

The singing competition

I suppose anything that gets people singing is, by definition, 'a good thing' and therefore be spared any criticism. So I should stop there really, perhaps just pausing to express my genuine admiration for those who put their spare time into running choirs. Last week I went to see a singing competition in a church in the city centre. It wasn't supposed to be a competition but more on that later. I normally avoid such affairs but my daughter was in a theatre choir that had entered the not-a-competition for the first time. I didn't stay for the second half as she needed to get back to be ready for an early start the next day but I saw all five acts in the first half.

First up was the junior choir from a rural area of Norfolk. The repertoire was almost exclusively religious, by which I mean Christian. No harm in that of course but if it hadn't been for the clothes it could have been the 1950s which was probably the era of both the conductor and accompanist. The theatre choir came next with 'Ave Verum Corpus' and a sweet arrangement of 'Cant Take My Eyes Off You'. And then the rural choir's seniors came on with 'Danny Boy' - a maudlin dirge if you ask me but beautifully sung and well suited to the room's acoustics - and two songs of praise. Less suited to the acoustic was 'Fascinating Rhythm'. I was upstairs in the gallery and the notes were playing pinball around my ears.

Occasionally I see something that makes me think 'Only in Norfolk...' and it usually involves a well-meaning attempt to recreate something from another culture. Watching this choir try to jive along to the Gershwin number and, later, to 'Down by the Riverside' reminded me that Norfolk is probably one of the few places on the planet where you will find people still clapping on the downbeat. Classical musicians really can't swing and it seems traditional choirs struggle too. It put me in mind of 'Can Blue Men Sing the Whites' by the Bonzos but I'm sure it was good enough for the doting mums and dads in a church in Norwich.


So a breath of fresh air, and a complete surprise, when a choir from rural Suffolk took to the stage with 'African Sanctus'. I've always loved this song since seeing the 1968 film 'If' starring Malcolm McDowell. McDowell had a good line in brooding obsessives, most famously Alex in 'A Clockwork Orange'. Here he plays a revolutionary schoolboy in an English public (meaning exclusive and private) school. The choir did this very well and followed it with a South African song sung in one of the native languages. It turned out that their conductor/leader was from South Africa. My partner is a dancer and wasn't hugely impressed by their attempts to move along to the music and get themselves on and off stage in an authentic fashion but it worked for me.

And finally the rural Norfolk choirs combined for a mixed choir. More of the same really. They were good at what they did but I had seen and heard enough of them. That's not their fault. The fact that only three choirs, in truth, had come along to the first half speaks volumes. I don't know how many made the second half but probably not many. And that is why, for all the 'like punk (or even Suez) never happened' ethos, it is very definitely 'a good thing' and should be applauded.

Holiday reading and Opera

With the possible exception of John Adams I have never been a particular fan of opera. There is no denying the emotional intensity, the skill of the composers and musicians and the sheer power of the singers. Opera is truly awesome but I'm afraid it is largely wasted on me and it occupies a place in my mind adjacent to Heavy Metal.

But there is hope for me yet. In the same way that an unfamiliar sport becomes more interesting when the rules are explained, my appreciation of opera has recently increased through greater understanding. During the half term break (how long ago it seems now) I read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. The plot centres around a hostage 'situation' in an unnamed American republic. Among the captives is a renowned soprano.

For a number of years I kept up a subscription to The Wire largely because I enjoyed reading the reviews of obscure pieces of music I knew I was never going to hear. My pleasure came from imagining what the music would sound like and the descriptions made it spring to life in my head. Bel Canto contains some of the most evocative descriptions of music I can remember reading. Here's a short extract.

"There should have been an orchestra behind her but no one noticed its absence. No one would have said her voice sounded better with an orchestra, or that it was better when the room was immaculately clean and lit by candles. They did not notice the absence of flowers or champagne, in fact, they knew now that flowers and champagne were unnecessary embellishments. Had she really not been singing all along? The sound was no more beautiful when her voice was limber and warm. Their eyes clouded over with tears for so many reasons it would be impossible to list them all. They cried for the beauty of the music, certainly, but also for the failure of their plans. They were thinking of the last time they had heard her sing and longed for the women who had been beside them then. All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear. When she was finished, the people around her stood in stunned and shivering silence. Messner leaned into the wall as if struck. He had not been invited to the party. Unlike the others, he had never heard her sing before."

It's a very good book all round, winning the Orange Prize in 2002 (when my kids were much younger and time/space for reading harder to come by. If you like a good story, string characterisation and a musical thread or two then you could do far worse.

The new keyboard

For years I have been promising myself a new MIDI controller keyboard. In about 1990 I was lent a Cheetah Masterseries V5 keyboard that was surplus to the requirements of its owner. This replaced a Yamaha home keyboard that had stopped working properly. My generous benefactor was of an itinerant nature and there was never a good time for him to take back the keyboard which would, after all, have been merely an inferior back-up for his new machine. In the end he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, I also move house and we lost touch.

First made in 1987, the Cheetah predates the home computing age and was designed to control other keyboards and those sound generating boxes and samplers that we first thought of as keyboards without keys. I only ever used it for playing notes into Cubase, my music software of choice. I thought it would eventually just pack up but but what finally did for it was a small rabbit called Pumpkin.

During the cold weather Pumpkin turned into a house rabbit. Rabbits are sociable beasts and need to be kept in pairs so he lived indoors, in the company of humans, for the sake of his mental health. All went well to begin with but then he got into chewing through wires. In a short space of time he ate through a USB lead, three telephone extensions cables, the wire of a Wii sensor bar and the power supply (switched off at the time but only 9v anyway) lead of the Cheetah keyboard. Now Pumpkin, neutered, lives outside with Pirate, also neutered.

So, the perfect excuse to replace the keyboard. I did fix the mains lead but then the wire gave up right next to the 'wall wart' transformer. I soldiered on, scoring an animation by walking over to the piano, playing for a while and then drawing the notes into Cubase, and auditioning sounds, with the mouse. My work rate ground to a near halt and on Monday I went to my local instrument shop and splashed out on a Novation 49SL MkII. It does all sorts of fancy things that I am only just beginning to get my head around and, at four octaves instead of five, is much more compact. It will cut out a lot of mouse work and that can only be a good thing. The plethora of coloured lights are reassuringly Starship Enterprise and soon I'll know what they all mean and be able to 'make it so'.

And the Cheetah? In January one sold on eBay for £11.50, minus its power supply. I imagine I'll keep this as a spare until I can find a volunteer to give it a home. I may even fix the power supply, which has a DIN plug connector. They really don't make them like they used to - the Cheetah was built to be repaired and serviced. The Novation, unless I am very much mistaken, is destined for land fill sooner or later. I hope it's later.

Another month, another game

For those who don't yet know, I post a new music/sound game on my website at the beginning of each month. This month's is called Call My Name and is good for developing rhythm skills, good for developing listening skills and, well, just good fun. It's absolutely free so be my guest and take a look. It's aimed at players from nine years old to adult and should keep your group amused and productively engaged for five or ten minutes at least.

From that page you are just a click away from several other games that are permanent features of the site. Again, these are free to play and completely without obligation.

Music theory vs music practice

The Associated Board of the Royal Colleges of Music offers exams up to diploma level in voice and various instruments. It also offers to examine people in music theory. The syllabus rarely attracts candidates for its own sake but to take a practical exam beyond grade 5 one needs to have passed grade five theory. And so I often find myself teaching grade five theory to students who have never studied the subject before, picking up the theory they have needed as they learned their chosen instrument rather as a child learns their native language.

I had a very good teacher when I studied theory and will boast, at the right time and place, of my 100% result at grade 8. But there is something of the nerdy anorak about this achievement. 'Music theory' as taught for Associated Board exams has nothing to do with any theory of sound, acoustics or even music. It is purely a study of a particular, albeit widely used, system of notation. There is a difference between, say, learning French and learning about language as a broader concept.

The notation system we favour has proved remarkably robust in the face of change but is not especially well suited to everything it tries to describe. I have to resist the urge to defend it in the face of disgruntled students who hold me entirely responsible. Syncopation and music in the key of F#, for example, can be horrible to read. The playing would be easier if the notation were clearer. Easier still if it were taught by demonstration and imitation. And perhaps this explains why classical musicians, as a rule, can't 'swing' without sounding like Sunday school teachers at a rave. They are hung up on the description in preference to the reality. After all, why bother visiting Rome if you've already read the guide book?

While my expertise in music theory is not wholly useless, I hadn't fully understood my discomfort with it until I read a book review in last Saturday's Guardian. It contained a quote from the book, We Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier (Allen Lane) which goes: information is alienated experience. The ability to write, and so transmit, music and other languages is priceless but the written symbols are merely a description of the real thing.