Music Monday - Which layer of the music do you hear best?

A couple of weeks ago I attended a singing concert given by our graduating class of acting students. It is a class that I have taught for the past 25 years, and passed up this year as the start of a general reducing of my teaching hours. 

For past concerts I have been the accompanist and this time I was in the audience enjoying the whole experience. A couple of observations surprised me. For a start, I found that my attention kept straying to the pianist – despite compelling story-telling from the singers concerned. Was part of me wishing I was still on the piano stool? Or was it the fact that the accompanist is one of our finest local pianists? Or something else?

One of the challenges in training classes of acting students to sing is that there is a wide range of natural ability, experience and inclination present. This group were all strong at the story-telling aspect of singing, a couple had pitch issues and several are all round strong singers. With the last category, I was more able to appreciate the whole tapestry of their song – text on melody and the harmonic layers of the accompaniment.

In the week which followed, I was in one of my secondary school singing classes, but for once the students were silent. They were completing a written ‘marking up the score’ task in preparation for some sight-singing. In nearby rooms the faint sounds of clarinet and violin lessons could be heard. One of the students commented on how distracting the sounds were. Another said that she always likes to hear the background lessons when we are quiet in our singing class. Someone else noticed that the violin and clarinet clashed with each other but yet another student remarked that she thought it sounded like a really interesting piece of (unintentional) music. At this point a student, who had been intensely focussed on figuring out the solfa for the sight-singing piece, looked up and asked, “What are you talking about? I don’t hear anything.”

We can never really know what audiences hear when they listen to music. For example, that wonderful, evocative wash of sound in so many piano concerti of the Romantic period is created by the harmonic structure. We hum the tunes, but we inwardly hear the harmonies from both piano and orchestra.

How can we submit to the complete tapestry of music without our own preferences (and prejudices?) distracting?

Is it easier for audiences without music training to appreciate the whole concert experience?

These are my current preoccupying thoughts.