In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on December 11, 2008

I just got back from a six day concert tour in Mexico sponsored by the Orquesta del Nuevo Mundo in Mexico City.  It was an intriguing experience in many ways and, as I was sitting in the Toronto airport waiting to find out if I would get home again, a number of thoughts wended their way through my mind.

One of the first strands of thought was, really, an observation about how different audiences react differently.  While we (the Ottawa Bach Choir) were down in Mexico City, we sang four concerts, only two of which had any real audience overlap.  Of these two concerts, one on Saturday night at the Ex-Convento del Desierto de los Leones was entirely our own program with accompaniment by the Orquesta del Nuevo Mundo.  It is an absolutely beautiful local with fantastic acoustics, but, unfortunately, it really has little support facilities for performers (like heated changing rooms!).

The program we presented was all composed in the new world (okay, we snuck in one piece by Buxtehuder! [YouTube (not us)]) and ran the gamut from the 16th century to the late 20th.  Now, when we did the same program the day before for a different audience, the most popular piece was a rather “strange”, but quite rollicking, arrangement of Deck the Halls by Derek Holman.  While popular at the Saturday performance (hey, it’s a fun piece!), the talk afterwards, at least what I heard, was more about the older material and the Canadian songs.

On Monday, we performed Handel’s Messiah with the Orquesta del Nuevo Mundo at the Iglesia de San Josemaria Escriva.  To call it an “experience” just doesn’t capture the moment.  Parts of it were incredibly enthusiastic and well done, while other parts, and I am thinking of the pickup to All We Like Sheep, were, to be kind, “poor”.  And, for the audience, it just didn’t seem to matter whether something was done poorly, competently or brilliantly.

My second strand of thought was related to the first, but it has to do with the the relationship between the language of a performance vs. the language of the audience.  Let me stick with the Messiah performance for now.  Handel wrote the piece in English, so we performed it in that.  Now English choral singing has its own special accent – sort of an archaic BBC English that crosses class lines – and it is an accent that all of us use without thinking.  Listening to the soloists, however, brought home just how different it is when someone hasn’t been trained in that accent; indeed, it made me wonder how well the audience could understand what we were singing.

This brings me to my third strand of thought, which builds on the other two, and it is more of a question that an observation.  What is the level of “musical excellence” necessary to convey a story if the language cannot be understood?  I’m still mulling this one over but, as a preliminary guestimate, I would say that simple emotions and emotional sequences can be conveyed even with very poorly performed music, while more complex (and abstract) concepts require a much greater degree of precision and passion.  Okay, that’s not very insightful at all, but it serves as a base on which to build.

All of this is, really, just thoughts tossed down – a way to put some ideas out in a verbal / written form so that I can start working on them in more detail.  What I am really interested in doing with this is seeing how close “music” is to folklore / mythology (aka “narratives”) in terms of conveyance of understandings of how the world works.  I’m also interested in finding out under what circumstances formalizations reduce or enhance that communication, and in what areas one needs “training” and/or “education” in order to decode the meanings.

Category: Music
Tags: Music as communication, Orquesta del Nuevo Mundo