Performing

The Yerkes-Dodson curve

In my previous post on this subject, I looked at some of the effects of an over-active sympathetic nervous system on singers in performance. This often gets framed in terms of stage fright/performance anxiety, but the fight or flight response can also be responsible for bringing us into a state of peak performance. We don’t want to damp down this response completely; we just need to moderate it so we get the benefits of its stimulation without losing control.

A classic bit of research back in 1908 produced the Yerkes-Dodson curve, which shows that people perform least well at complex tasks if they are either under-aroused or over-aroused, and at their best somewhere in the middle. So, the strategies that follow all work on the principle that you need to keep performers below the optimal level of arousal before they get to the stage. This will allow the flush of adrenaline as the performance starts to lift them into the ideal zone, rather than beyond it.

A discussion over on Choralnet from a couple of weeks back has prompted to me write about a phenomenon I’ve been thinking about for a while. The main subject is about the role of the conductor in performance, and its relationship to the rehearsal process – itself an interesting subject, but not my focus today. Rather it was the passing comments about managing individual voices and balance issues in performance that caught my attention.

What struck me was how the participants in the discussion took it for granted that this would be needed, even in the context of discussions about carefully-prepared performances. And this resonated with conversations I’ve had recently in which people have expressed disappointment at hearing voices popping out in performances by ensembles they thought had a better grasp of choral craft than that.

Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares is one of those books about which I’ve been thinking, ‘Must read that someday,’ for years. Someday arrived by chance recently when I spotted it on the ‘recently returned’ shelf at the library and picked it up on an impulse. And by now of course wished I’d read it years ago.

Back when I was teaching Musical Philosophies and Aesthetics to the postgrads at Birmingham Conservatoire, a frequent subject for discussion was the relationship between the text and the performer. Is the performer a creator or merely a puppet? How can a performer speak with their own voice whilst still being true to the composer’s message? What, exactly, is interpretation?

I’ve had several conversations recently with directors about the challenges involved in learning big pieces. Big implies, at the most obvious level, pieces that go on for longer than usual, though that also usually brings with it a degree of expressive size too. There are three distinct dimensions to the stamina demands these pieces place on a choir, and while they are interrelated, it’s worth identifying them separately:

For all that all choral genres generally share an overall sense of shared ethos (executive summary: singing is a Good Thing To Do), moving between different traditions can throw up some interesting challenges. I had an interesting Facebook chat recently with a singer who has plenty of experience in the kinds of choir that simply ‘stand and sing’ – i.e. where it is about the music, not about the performers. He was talking about some of the challenges he’d had in moving into a world that was much more focused on personal expressiveness.

What he found was that, while he was quite comfortable finding his way into the mood of the music in a general way, his peers were asking for a more active narrative, particularly in the way he used facial expression. ‘And at this point ,’ he said, ‘one of two things tends to happen:

I have commented before in passing on the way that popular melodies from the 1960s onwards look - on paper – more rhythmically complex than tunes from the earlier parts of the 20th century. They appear to have a lot more syncopation, and they seem rarely to cadence exactly on the beat – instead either anticipating or delaying over the barline.

The reason for this is not, however, because popular music has particularly become more complex over time (you get examples of both simple and complex melodies throughout the 20th century), but because the processes of musical production have changed.

Jessica Duchen has been berating her fellow critics for getting into a swivet about concert dress. Her basic stance is: calm down and listen to the music, as that’s what matters. Which is a nice way of turning the complainers’ arguments back on them. If they object to female performers dressing in trendy and attractive clothing because classical music is supposed to be timeless and above the concerns of the flesh, then they should put their attention onto the performance instead of wittering on about mundane things like clothes.

Tuning is a funny thing. In some respects it is a very objective element of music, clearly explicable in terms of acoustical properties. We’ve understood perfect intervals since Pythagoras after all. But when you start measuring sounds with human ears rather than scientific instruments, things become less clear-cut.

Our ears pick up the both the fundamental of a note and the halo of overtones that all sounds other than sine waves carry with them, between the frequencies of 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. How our brains render this collection of sounds into a perception of pitch, though, is complex and not fully understood. It’s clear we perceptually wrap the overtones into the fundamental that generates them, producing a sensation of a single note of a particular quality rather than hearing lots of different related notes as would be displayed on a spectrogram. But this combined, perceptual pitch is not necessarily identical to the fundamental: the overtones can inflect our sense of tuning as well as of quality.