The moral lessons of singing and playing in tune

In choral circles right now, a large swath of the programming on festivals and conferences often includes what my friend John Muehleisen calls, “choral neo-pop.” It’s music that is made of assemblages of musical clichés with a “social justice” lyric. I used the scare quotes because the texts rarely delve deeply enough to be so controversial that they couldn’t be performed in a public high school. We aren’t talking about Shostakovich scoring music for Das Neue Babylon, a movie about the barricade wars in St. Petersburg calling for a red revolt against the capitalist system. We aren’t talking about things like Martirano’s “L’s GA” or Crumb’s “Black Angels.” Those pieces are explicitly questioning the military/industrial complex of the America Empire. It’s safer fare than that. What generally gets programmed is some sort of bromide for unity over a pop chord progression but with 2 to 4 parts of harmony. In many ways, it’s not very surprising. With some very notable exceptions, the choral crowd tends to be on the left politically and somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun in their musical tastes. The liberal political tendencies are foiled by a musical conservatism that is quite radical. 

People are frustrated politically, and they want to do something that matters and makes a difference. They want to do something that changes lives. One friend recently suggested that many of today’s conductors are really more interested in being politicians than they are in being musicians. I’m not sure that the two are so exclusive. Musicians have always been people, and people have always been political. Their political feelings get expressed musically. Whether your talking about Byrd writing a song about the Queen’s dog, or Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli, or Beethoven’s Eroica, there has always been a political component to musicking. Berlioz led the singing of the Marseille in the streets during the 1830 Revolution. The 20th century is replete with examples, two of my favorites being the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima by Penderecki and A Survivor from Warsaw by Schoenberg.

In the 1960s, these same frustrations manifested in the musical avant garde. It resulted in pieces of art that were honestly controversial. It was musically untamed and far too contentious for most of today’s ensembles and audiences to stomach. Today, much of the music being performed at today’s choral festivals (and here I mean the notes, pitches, and rhythms) is so trite and unimportant, it leaves the chief burden of content on the text and not on the specifically musical elements. I’m not going to try to resolve all the issues surrounding music’s interaction with text here, but these issues do bring up some serious questions about how music changes us and what effects it has on the people who are participating in it.  I actually think that the main way music changes us is not through the encounter with the poetry. It is the encounter with music itself that teaches us moral lessons.

At St. Paul’s Episcopal in Kansas City, we have a large choir that is lead by eight professional section leaders. We also have many gifted volunteers. Many of them have music degrees, but many of them don’t. Last year, at one of the rehearsals, our intrepid leader, Sam Anderson, spent about 10 minutes getting the volunteers to sing an A major chord in tune…like, really in tune. He worked with them to get their vowels to match. He worked with them to get their placement aligned. Then, it happened. They heard an A major chord really in tune, and immediately one of them said, “Let’s do that again!” They had experienced beauty, and they wanted to experience it again. That is the way it happens with the traditional transcendental categories of truth, beauty, and goodness. Experiencing one of the transcendental horizons draws you beyond yourself. It begins teaching you how to change so that you can live. In this case, it wasn’t singing a text that did it. It was the simple experience of singing together in tune. That encounter was teaching the musicians moral lessons about how to live. This is why intonation is never purely a technical issue. It is always also a moral issue. If an ensemble is out of tune, it is because someone is being selfish.

Here are some of the lessons you learn from singing and playing in tune:

1. You have to be yourself and make room for others. If you take up too much room, you will push others to the edges and not allow them to be themselves. If you try to hide, you are not making the contribution that only you can make. You actually have to learn how to be honest about who you are while still making enough space for others to be honest about who they are. Selfishness in this situation can mean holding your ground when you’re right. A friend and long time member of the KC Chorale tells a story about when she first started singing with the group. It was an a cappella piece, and the ensemble started to drift south. She has perfect pitch, so she tried to turn the ship on her own. She had to learn that sometimes being right about pitch has to be sacrificed for the good of the whole. This is why intonation in musical ensembles is always really a moral problem. Someone in the ensemble is taking too much space for themselves and dragging others down with them. Then, someone else tries to fight it by pulling everyone back up. You have to learn how to trust each other and work together.

2. I used to hang around with a professional string quartet, and would occasionally play with them on certain projects. They had the most intimate and frightfully harmonious ensemble that I have ever witnessed. Several of us that played with them on occasion would talked about learning how to “crack the code” of inserting yourself into the ensemble. They could start simultaneously (seemingly) without any sort of signal to each other. They had been playing together for 20 years, and the normal cues musicians use were so subtle, that it was imperceptible to an outside observer (or an inside observer.) I was amazed one summer when I was on faculty with them for a summer chamber institute. The second violinist said, “In any ensemble, each player has their own subtle sense of where the beat is and where the pitch should be.” With all those subtle differences, you have to learn how to give an take with each other in order to be an ensemble. Rehearsing with them, was a lesson in honesty, and could be almost combative at times within the safe space of a long time ensemble. Each member was wildly assertive in advocating for their own perspective as they pushed toward a unified vision for a particular piece.

3. I used to play in an improvisation duo. One of the things you have to learn when you are improvising is how to trust your partner(s). Sometimes, you can take a risk and go to far. You get bewildered and lose sense of the structure. When that happens, I found that when one of us would start going off the rails, the other would become more grounded and explicit so that the one spinning away from the structure could find a place to land more gently. The same thing happens for intonation. Everyone has bad days. You have to learn to trust each other especially on those occasions when you take a risk and go too far outside. On days when you are weak, you have to trust those around you that are strong. On days when you are strong, you have to help those that are struggling.

I’m not really out to change what people are doing in their programming. Well, I sort of am doing that, but it’s a minor annoyance at best. I’m just suggesting that the transcendental horizon in the music itself — separate from a text — has plenty of moral lessons to teach us if we are willing to listen. In fact, it likely has more to teach us than pairing an innocuous text with a pop progression and writing some harmonies for people to sing. The end result of that is neither good pop music nor good choral music. You wind up with the worst of both worlds.