A couple of days ago, Max Forte put up an excellent post on Trinidadian music taking an in-depth look at one particular performance piece and, if you haven’t read it yet, you really should. One line in particular has been rattling around in my brain every since I read it:

Shadow and Sonia do not teach social theory, they chart it out in dance, and practice it through sung metaphor.

I love that phrase “sung metaphor”; it is such an apt way of describing what goes on in a good performance. And, like all good performances, it points towards the symbolic and informational nature of what “performance” used to be.

All right, I know the phase “used to be” is probably evoking images of crotchety grandparents talking about how rough they used to have it “back in the day”. Actually, what I am really driving at is the fragmentation in performance of context, audience and media and how this is shifting our interpretations and uses of music in particular and performance in general.

Before we had sound recording technology, music was performed in a social context were all performances were “live” and, usually, part of a greater cultural scripting of events. Most of the music I now perform, Renaissance and Baroque, was composed for and performed in Church services as part of a larger symbolic tapestry, and “illusion”, designed to draw in people and reinforce certain views of reality by providing the “audience” with a set of emotional experiences that validated a particular ideological system. In this setting, “performance” is all about the transmission of a patterned set of experiences; ritual drivers that evoke and condition the perceptions of the audience. It is “magic” is the sense of that term used by Dion Fortune - “The Art and Science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with Will.” Today, we would call it an “Information Operation”.

But not all live performances are equal. There are differences in technical merit, in performative efficacy (i.e. how well can a performer draw an audience into their “illusion”), and, perhaps most importantly, in the context. Today, when I sing a Baroque Mass or other piece, it is in the context of a “performance” and not as part of a Church ritual. The audience, at least in North America, holds an expectation that is radically different from the expectations of a congregation of the early 18th century; an expectation that centres on what experiences they are prepared (and preconditioned) to be open to or, in other words, what they will “let” the music evoke in them.

The context of performance for Baroque music is interesting and requires a bit of explanation. First, the music was written for church acoustics and “sounds” very different in other venues. This is why it is best performed in churches or concert halls with “good” acoustics (specifically, “live” acoustics - it has to resonate). The absolute “best” place to perform a given composition is for the performance to take place in the specific venue for which it was written, so singing Bach in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig is not only more “authentic”, it is “better” since the music was written for that acoustic. So, if you want to sing Baroque music “properly”, it will almost always be sung in a church, which brings me to the second point about context: the “scene”.

The original “scene” for almost all choral Baroque music was as part of a church service. In effect, the music was an integral part of the service (not the centrepiece), and the words were part of the general liturgy. So, if you were singing a mass, the “performance” would be “chopped up” into its appropriate place in the service, rather than presented as a “whole”, as it is in concerts. This “chopping up” changes the experience by situating it into only one part of a series of actions taken by the “audience” (congregation) and, unlike a concert, the perceptual “goal” of the ritual is towards the “mystery” being celebrated rather than towards the “experience” of the music.

This point, about audience expectation, was hammered home to me last year when our choir was touring in Germany and Austria in our first performance of the tour at the Schlosskirche in Bayreuth. The venue of the performance, and it was advertised as a “concert”, was in the Schlosskirche, which is definitely in the mode of Baroque churches. Here are a couple of pictures I took of it before the performance to give you an idea of what it looks like on the inside.

All in all, it is an acoustically “nice” church that is quite a good place for Baroque music performances (less good for meeting people; don’t arrange to meet someone by the “front door”, there isn’t one). So, the setting was good from an acoustical view point, and the specific scene was that of a concert. The music we sang ranged from the early 17th century into the 20th century covering the Rennaisance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and “modern” periods.

One of the pieces we performed was Immortal Bach by Knut Nystedt (the YouTube video below is the same piece performed by the Monteverdi Choir).

The words, which can be a touch difficult to hear in a recording, are

Komm süsser Tod, komm sel’ge Ruh!
Komm führe mich in Friede.

Come sweet death, come celestial ease!
Come, lead me in peace.

After we sang the concert, a woman who was in her 80’s or, possibly, ’90’s, came up to our conductor and thanked her saying that now she could die in peace. As you can imagine, that isn’t the reaction we normally get from our audiences! But in the hour after the concert, as we were getting a guided tour of the church and learning more about the people who were there, we heard more about her - how she had lost her family and was alone, how she had blamed God for that (and other) losses, and how she had feared death. Something in that performance had reached out to her and changed her allowing her to view her impending death with equanimity. To this day, I have no idea if she ever reconciled with her God, but I do know that, at that particular point in time, she was reconciled to her humanity.

That type of effect, and I have seen some very strange variants of it in 30 years of singing, is not strange in live performances. In a less “religious” format, back when I was singing in Irish pubs, I would see people coming in depressed and suicidal, full of anger and angst, and leave feeling upbeat, in control of (or at least reconciled to) their lives, and feeling that they could change them. But, interestingly enough, I have rarely heard of the same effect operating with recordings. It is as if the abreative effects of the ritual of a live performance do not translate well to a recorded medium. Certainly people can set, change or maintain a mood via a recording, but the interactivity that seems to be crucial to an abrupt change is missing.

A century ago, musical performance was an intimately interactive social event, whether it took place in churches, music halls, bars or people’s parlours around the piano: it was an event in which all not only could but should participate. Increasingly today, music is “professionalized” and performance has become something that can only be “done” by “experts”; a trend established and enforced by the music recording industry, at least in the Western world. But that is not how we, as a species, evolved with music. Even Bach, who is generally considered to be an “expert” as well as a musical genius, was raised in a tradition of people’s music - in his case, Lutheran hymns.

Note that I used the tern “people’s music” and not “popular music” - the two are different. “Popular” refers to what is popular, not what is generally performed by a people. This is an important distinction, and one of the reasons why I love the phrase “sung metaphor” that Max used in his post. People’s music, as opposed to popular music, is all about sung metaphors; metaphors of life, death, birth, love, combat, peace, and life in general that reflect and refract from our daily lives. It is, in effect, a reflection and a performance of the stories we tell about our selves and others - the ultimate, self created and self performed, Information Operation giving, reinforcing, challenging and sometimes destroying our conceptualizations of “reality”.

I do have to wonder what this says about societies that hand this power over to a specialized class of “professionals” to convey and a small number of “executives” to manage. I find myself paraphrasing Charlton Heston’s famous 5 Words speak and saying “From my cold dead lips!”.