The newsbar which runs along the bottom of the screen on BBC
World television the other day included a tantalising snippet which, if it was
reported in any of the bulletins, passed me by.
It ran something like this; “Research shows that public can identify
winners of classical music competitions from watching silent videos”. I am not surprised this item did not make it
beyond the few lines of text put up on screen in a lull between the latest
atrocities in Egypt and Syria; it’s hardly earth-shattering news. Indeed, for any of us involved in assessment
of classical music performances, it is not news at all. We’ve known it all along.
Ask any adjudicator or examiner and they will tell you that
they know how well an individual is going to perform from the very moment they
walk on stage or into the examination room.
It takes only a few notes to confirm the impression and, in truth, you
rarely need to hear anything at all to arrive at the same conclusion as you do
after 45 minutes of a recital. There’s
something about the way a performer approaches their instrument, the way they
hold themselves before singing or the way in which they address their audience
that tells you straight away how good they are.
I occasionally jot down my guess as to what the final result
is going to be before even the first note has been struck; and at least 80% of
the time I’m absolutely spot on. Which
is not to say, of course, that my colleagues and I do not listen with compete
attention to what is being played. All
examiners have horror stories about writing words like “an impressive level of
accuracy”, only immediately for the candidate to go off on a wild tangent
leaving the score in metaphorical shreds, or declaring “a highly
intelligent and perceptive interpretation”
only for the player to commit the most appalling interpretative solecisms. And it’s only once the very final note has
died away (and often the final note can destroy a performance – a nervous
player often forgetting that the piece ends only in the silence which follows
the final double bar) that a truly fair assessment of the performance can be
made. But the fact remains, those first
impressions usually give a fair proportion – if not all – of the game away.
There is a solid reason behind this - it’s certainly not
just instinct. Like any craftsman, a
musician develops a relationship with an instrument which evolves to an extent whereby
the two seem, if not inseparable, then made for each other. Look at the great violinists – how their necks
seem bereft when there’s no violin tucked in.
Look at great singers – how their lungs seem to have developed to such
an extent that their whole body seems to be designed around projecting the
voice. Look at a master cellist’s legs –
although perhaps we better not go there!
A drunken session in a pub with fellow music students at
university resulted in an animated discussion about how we could tell what
instruments people played by what they drank.
Pointless as that exercise was, one can often tell what instrument people
play by just looking at them. Oboists
have tight lips, tuba players have great rubbery ones, violinists often seem
tense and highly strung while viola players let their bottom lips droop as if
trying to catch bottom-dwelling notes (which is probably behind that scurrilous
and wholly false assertion that viola players are thick). Double Bass players lope along like bears in
a world of their own, Trombone players often seem to have elasticated arms, and
Trumpeters have three fingers of their right hand so well developed that when
they hold their beer glasses it sometimes looks as if they are about to squash
them flat (which takes us back to the business of telling instrumentalists from
their beverage of choice).
Which begs the question.
Is this physical similarity between player and instrument the result of
a protracted partnership or merely the coincidental natural physical
characteristics of the player? If the
latter, then a musician’s performance might be assessed not just before they
have struck a note but years before; before, indeed, they had even met the
instrument on which they subsequently perform. If this is the case, then the
newsbar text might have written; “Research shows that winners in classical
music competitions can be identified at birth”. Clearly, then, for a musician
to succeed in later life it is vital that the correct pairing of person to
instrument is made at the very earliest stages of musical development.
Despite a growing industry in identifying through
psychological and physical profiling which instruments best suit which children,
it is still too often a hit-and-miss affair resulting in thousands of children
with pronounced musical potential being turned off because they are being
taught on an inappropriate instrument.
The problem is particularly acute here in Asia where the incentive to
play an instrument is governed largely by peer pressure. Tens of thousands play the piano, when it is
manifestly the wrong instrument for them, and as a consequence too many
potentially fine instrumentalists are, in effect, stillborn. There is every bit as much likelihood that a
Chinese child could become a Clarinet phenomenon as a Piano one, but not while
this ridiculous piano-or-nothing culture persists. Too few parents understand how important it
is for a young child to take up a musical instrument with which they can
properly relate, and thereby express those inner feelings which remain forever
internalised without the outlet of music.
I know there’s a lot of research going into this issue, but
I wish it could sometimes hit the headlines. If doting parents saw taut lips on
their infant progeny, should not their natural reaction be “my son’s going to
be an oboe player”, or, when identifying a tendency to bow-leggedness, proclaim
“we have a potential cellist in the family”?
Does baby grasp the bottle tightly with the right hand fingers firmly
round it (trumpet player) or dribble its contents over their chin
(violist). So much better this than the
tendency to see the natural fun any infant gets out of hammering a keyboard and
hearing a noise, as indicating the arrival of the next Lang Lang.
Of course, by now, attentive readers will have found the
original research at the heart of the BBC text for themselves (an excellent
piece by Chia-Jung Tsay of University College, London available on www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/16/1221454110
) and discovered it has nothing to do with what I have written about. But why, as they say, spoil a good blog post
with slavish attention to facts and, in any case, the real subject of the
research – the reliance on visual over aural perceptions – is too close to my
heart not to warrant a further post sometime soon. Watch – rather than hear – this space.
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