DISGI PLH JE AND/ORART --
I •v e often thought that the most immediate and exciting e :::. 2ment i n cho-rnl singing is the same quality which is responsible for the e motion al i rr.. ~Jac t cf c.1. mi H tar y para de, any good athletic team, or an expert chorus line lik e th e _t-:0c ke t,tes: na mely, the fact that many persons are doing exactly th e same t hin g a.t exactly t he same time. As a matt er of fact, you can carry the principl e t o pr e tty terrifying extremes -- moral and ethical -- and come up with Fa scism. A~ any rate, dis c ipline (or precision) is a terrific instrument -- and no c hor a l ef fort is going to register without exploiting it. The point is wheth er it remains an instrument, subservient, to beauty the inher en t morality of music (for none of man's arts has more rightness wrongness), or whether it deteriorates into (a) style or (b) effect. Now I think it ought to be possible for out becoming slot machines. It certainly is cision techniques of ennunciation to become tive, rather than a seri e s of stock cliches form musical and lyrical con t our
and or
us to phrase and ennun ci at e wi th not too soon for the simple pr e -·tools, immediate, sup ple, and sensi and grotesque caricatures which de -
It's a pretty sad and degrading thing for singer and conductor alike when, in order to gain simple precision, the conductor is forced into unr e asoned dj_s cipline and artistic fascism. That which might be ali v e beco~es a mask. DYN AMIC CONTOUR -I have often wondered if there weren't really two rather distinct phra s in g te chniques: one for what we term "homophonic" music where the struc t ure is pr imaril y harmonic - or vertical, and the words fall in all voices at t he s ame t ime i n the manner of hymns, chorales, and most of the stylized popular arran ge ment s j an d another for "polyphonic" music where the structure is primarily me l odi c or horizontal, and the words fall in different voices at different times by v irt ue of what we t erm canonic imitation and cOlmterpoint. The t erm that indicates to me where the distinction lies i s "un it of dyn ami c contour." Now, that may sound a bit fancy-pants, but it a t leas t s ays it all at once. Another t erm might be "span of the soft-loud. " That is: with re s pect to dynamics (loud-softness), music has a sha pe - a contour. To f a l l back on a not ineffectual metaphor, the unit of phrasing in music is lik e a wav e : i t has amplitud e ("rise" and 11fall 11) and it has mot ion or dire ct i on ( it goes s omeplace. Now i n homophonic music the unit of "rise and falln, of n1oud-softn, is usually no mor e than the short span of a single ch ord or word or even sy llabl e of a wor d. And the shap e of the 11loud-soft 11, t he 11dyna rnic cont our' \ will te c lo s el y hin ged to the phonetic structure of the wor d, to t he proper pr oporti ons of voue l t o consonant and vowel to vowel. Thus in songs like n1e t Down Th.::: Bars 11 an d "Here I s Thy Foots t ool" almost each syllable must be gi ve n a c~,'.1,··,n 1_c c on ·~-our , mus t hav e its own lo udne ss and s oft nes s, its own sh a r e a nd s t ress. And whi le there is bound to be a l on ger phrase (so that neith er mel o(y or s en se su f f er) t he unit r emai ns t he word or syllable.