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IT ISN’T JUST THE MUSIC:
A PCP VIEW OF THE COMPLEXITIES, PERPLEXITIES
AND JOYS OF CHORAL SINGING
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Cintra Whitehead |
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Ocala, Florida, USA |
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Abstract
Choral
singing offers the chorister many opportunities to elaborate his or her
construct system musically and socially, and to experience the elation and joy
that come from successful rehearsals and performances. The necessity to
concentrate on the music and other elements allows the singer to remove
him/herself from the everyday world for a few hours during rehearsal and performance
and allows the chorister to live in a small world of music where he/she has
learned to construe, predict and control with a high degree of accuracy which
gives rise to a feeling of mastery and delight while still providing a
stimulating variety of experience.
Keywords: PCP, personal construct psychology, choral
singing, music, emotion, Brahms
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INTRODUCTION
The poster in the college bookstore invited
community members to join the Kenyon Community Chorus to sing the Mozart
Requiem with the Knox County Symphony. I was intrigued by the idea but I
hesitated. I asked myself the Prufrockian question: Do I dare to construe myself as one who can sing Mozart?
The word construe had become an important part of my vocabulary at that
time, for I was then writing articles for and preparing to publish Constructive Criticism: A Journal of Construct
Psychology and the Arts (Whitehead, 1991) and was immersed in George A
Kelly’s Psychology of Personal Constructs
(1955). My primary goal was – and still is – to convince the practitioners of
academic psychological literary criticism that all modern personality theories –
not just the Freudian and neo-Freudian views that have dominated the field for
far too long – are relevant to that discipline. Through my investigation of
modern personality theories, I had found that I had a personal preference for
the personality theory of George A. Kelly. It made sense to me; it was
aesthetically pleasing to me; and it worked beautifully in probing the works of
the many writers whose implicit informal personality theories were congruent
with it. And so I was thinking in Kellyan terms when I asked: Do I dare to construe
myself as one who can sing Mozart? My answer came in Kellyan terms as well. Thinking
of Kelly’s Choice Corollary (Kelly,
1955, pp. 64-68), I told myself that
clearly the elaborative choice would be to answer, yes, I do dare to construe
myself as one who can sing Mozart. After all, I had been singing in one group
or another since early childhood; I could read music; I could sing on key. Why
not sing Mozart?
I arrived at the first rehearsal on the
first Wednesday of September, hot, hurried and crotchety because I had had
difficulty finding a parking space. Inside the performance hall, I found myself
at the end of a queue. As I advanced along the aisle toward the stage, I saw
that the purpose of the line-up was to procure a bundle of music and a black
leatherette binder in which to place it. Once I had my music, I looked around
the hall and noticed that folding chairs had been set up on the stage in a shallow
arc four or five rows deep. Many people stood about on the floor of the
auditorium, chatting animatedly to each other, but I didn’t know anyone and so
eyed the folding chairs on the stage. A few people had begun to find seats
there and, relying on my past choral experience, I guessed that the alto
section would be in the front two rows, stage left. A pleasant-looking woman,
perhaps ten years my senior, was seated in the second row from the front and so
I approached her and asked if that was the alto section. She affirmed my guess
and invited me to sit beside her. I began looking through the bundle of music I
had been given. “I thought we were to sing the Mozart Requiem,” I said. “Oh, we are,” she replied, “but not until the
spring concert. This music is for the December concert. The Mozart scores
aren’t available yet, and we won’t begin serious work on that until January.” Already
my main prediction about what this first rehearsal would be like had been
invalidated. I had more surprises to come.
In the few minutes remaining before the
rehearsal was to begin, I shuffled through the music I had been given. There
were seven pieces: one that I didn’t hold much enthusiasm for was William
Byrd’s “Terra tremuit.” But then there was a “Libera me, Domine” by Anton
Bruckner, “Hallelujah, Amen” by Händel, two Negro Spirituals, and finally the
two that looked most interesting to me: a tricky little piece by Aaron Copland
called “Ching-A-Ring Chaw,” and “Modern Music” by William Billings, that quaintly
quirky early American singing master who deserves more recognition than he gets.
Well, it wasn’t Mozart, but it looked like fun.
After rehearsal schedules were distributed,
we began our warm-up when the conductor asked us to stand and then said, “Hiss
at me!” Like everyone else, I began exhaling slowly between my teeth. We then
went through some breathing exercises and finally began to vocalize. The
warm-up lasted at least twice as long as any choral warm-up I had ever experienced,
and our director paused to tell us that he thought that warm-ups were very
important and that as we progressed through the music for the first concert and
then began rehearsing the Requiem he
would use warm up exercises to help us to tackle and solve problems that we
would encounter in the musical scores. By the time we turned to our music, I
was feeling energized and focused, and enjoyed every minute of the time we
spent sight reading through several of the pieces. Rehearsal ended far too
soon, and by the time we stashed our music into our folders and prepared to
leave, I realized that I had replaced invalidated constructs and the predictions
based on them with new or elaborated constructs. I would be singing the Mozart Requiem at some point, but in preparing
for the intervening concert which was to be accompanied, not by orchestra, but by
piano, I would be preparing for the longer and more difficult Requiem. In the brief two hours of the
first rehearsal I had come to construe our director as one who really cared
about his singers and their voices and who would guide us with intelligence, wit,
energy and respect. “Oh,” I said to myself as I walked to my car – no longer
hot, hurried and crotchety, “You have indeed made an elaborative choice.”
The December concert was a huge success,
performed before an appreciative and enthusiastic audience. The last two
numbers of the Community Chorus half of the program were my favorites “Ching-A-Ring
Chaw” and William Billings’ “Modern Music.” Thanks to our director’s coaching,
our delivery of “Ching-A-Ring Chaw” was crisp, accurate and spirited. Now,
nearly twenty years later, listening to the recording of the performance of it
and “Modern Music,” I am pleased at our musicality and especially at our diction
(for if the audience couldn’t understand the words, the impact of both pieces
would be lost). Diction is especially important in “Modern Music,” for this
amusing little piece is really its own sung program note which cleverly tells the
audience how to construe it and its technicalities of key in which we singers
are singing (the composer’s darling key being E), meter ( 6/4 being the meter
that we love the best), and, after some lessons in ascending and descending
scales and dynamics, ending with the adjuration to the audience that, we singers
having delivered our work competently, it was now the duty of the audience to
clap their applause. I loved the impudent reflexivity of the song and evidently
the audience did too. We reveled in their chuckles when they applauded
wholeheartedly.
Looking back on this concert, sung nearly
two decades ago, I find I am still learning from it – still forming constructs
about it. While playing the recording of the concert I begin to wonder why
those last two selections – Copland’s 20th-century treatment of the
old minstrel song “Ching-A-Ring Chaw” and the 18th-century “Modern
Music” – go so well together. Well, just as there is poetry about poetry, there
is music about music. The words Ching-A-Ring
Chaw are of course intended to suggest the sound of a banjo, and so in a
sense the song is music about making music. The Billings piece is even more directly music
about making music, the lyrics detailing each musical technique as the singers
sing it. And so now, all these years later, I see the answer to the very
Kellyan question: How are these two pieces alike and different from the rest of
the program? Clearly these two are alike in being music mirroring music while
the others are simply (but wonderfully) just music.
I am now wondering if our conductor, who
chose the pieces and their place in the program, had this construct in mind. If
so he did not verbalize it to us. But perhaps it was in the realm of preverbal
constructs for him as well as for me. I was too much taken up with the
necessity to sing well at the time to psychologize or philosophize about the
constructs. Perhaps reflection over time is sometimes necessary for us to
verbalize some of our constructs about music, art and life in general. Construct
formation is not necessarily a rapid process.
Immediately after the performance, however,
I found my head whirling with dozens of constructs which I could and did
verbalize, and with anticipations – trying to construe the music we had performed,
our conductor and our wonderful accompanist, the other singers, the audience,
and predicting what it would be like to sing the Mozart Requiem. Somehow I needed to find a way to order and prioritize all
these sensations. Maybe through Personal Construct Psychology I would find a
way.
We resumed rehearsals in January and by the
time we performed the Mozart Requiem
in April I knew that I had found my
musical home. I dwelt in that home for the next fourteen years, singing with my
fellow choristers everything from Bach, Beethoven and Brahms to Britten, Barber
and Kodaly, as well as American spirituals and even a Tsonga folk song. During
that time I was so immersed in the actuality of doing and making music, that I
hardly recognized the complexities and the challenges that the variety of
music, the rehearsals and the performances presented, but now, more than five
years after leaving the chorus that will always be my chorus – although I have sung in others in the interim – I begin
to construe and re-construe the experience and try to understand why it was
such a significant and memorable part of my life.
What was the super-ordinate construct under
which all the others had to be ordered? – or was it a construct? – maybe I
should ask, what is the most important element? – no, the language isn’t quite
right. So, what was the pre-eminent factor that I, as a chorister, had to make
sense of? The answer seems obvious: THE MUSIC. But then, what about the
conductor? Does he come after the music or before? He chooses the music and
places it in the program; he helps us interpret it. He commands the
accompaniment and the orchestra. But without the music, there could be nothing
else, and so I must start with the music.
CONSTRUING
MUSIC
One doesn’t stand and look at music as at a
painting. As Eric Button has pointed out (2006), music must exist by moving
through time. George Kelly wrote about the importance of time, stating that the
universe exists by happening and it can happen only because of the dimension of
time in which events can unfold (Kelly, 1955, Vol. I, pp. 7-8). It is the same
with music as with the other lively arts such as drama and fiction which
require time in order to happen, i.e., extend their plots or narratives from
the beginning, through the middle, and to the end. Obvious! Or is it? We could
indulge in an ontological argument that music of course does exist as black
notes on white paper when it is stored in the music drawer, but in order to
read or think about the music or perform it, we must move through time. As
black notes on white paper, music is a kind of language which we must learn to
read and speak. Unfortunately some of us speak it with a prose accent. Construing
my own musical facility, I realized that I was not truly happy with it and so I
found a voice coach and began piano instruction again after a hiatus of many
years. A bravura soloist I would never be, but being a better chorister was
certainly, I predicted, within my grasp.
But putting philosophical and metaphysical
speculation about the ontology of music aside, let us consider just what it is
that the choral singer must construe and predict as he/she works through a
choral work. There are the technicalities of key, pitch (and just where do I
find my note for the entrance at 3 after 200? Ah, yes, there it is in the tenor
line.) There are also time signature and tempo (and just how fast are we going
to take this passage?), intervals and dynamics. How do I master this interval
exactly? I spent many hours at the piano, playing through the alto line to be
sure of intervals, playing the harmonies and learning to fight for my note
against the other parts, and checking entrances.
And then there are the words that were the warp
to the weft of the music in the fabric of the piece. Because we often sang
settings of the Catholic Mass, how are the members of the chorus who happen to
be Jewish or Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist, or agnostic or atheist to deal with
the text? The answer seems to be, as music. If we regard the words as a part of
form – as one attempt of all possible attempts to find the spirit of the world
through art – we should be able to enunciate the Latin words and listen
primarily to the music which knows nothing but a yearning for something beyond
the everyday world, however and wherever it is construed to exist.
Most of our musical questions were resolved
by our conductor. He had construed many choruses before ours and had predicted
where we would find problems. I doubt that he knew anything of Personal
Construct Psychology, but if that psychology really does describe the way we
think, it should be no surprise to find our conductor anticipating our
hesitancies, doubts and questions and predicting the solutions he needed to
offer us.
One thing that often happens in rehearsals
that operates in opposition to the movement of music through time and the
construing of phrases, themes, and melodies which allow us to predict the
musical outcome that is normally so satisfying, is the need to go over and over
certain passages until they are right. Often a rehearsal consists of an attempt
to perfect two bars here, four bars there and eight bars further on or even
further back, so that the chronological flow of the whole piece is lost. We
were very fortunate in that our conductor realized that this could become
frustrating, and he would often permit us to sing the whole song or the whole section
of a longer work so that we could once again place brief, much-rehearsed passages
in the context of the whole and restore the progression through time with its
attendant construction and predictive processes.
CONSTRUING
THE CONDUCTOR
After – no actually while – construing the
music, the chorister must construe the conductor or rehearsal director. One of
the first questions that pop into a choral singer’s head is: can the conductor
distinguish my voice from all the others? And following that question, the next
arises: If he can distinguish my voice, will he embarrass me before all the
rest of the chorus by pointing out my errors? What does he want from me as a
singer?
Some
conductors approach the chorus with a dictatorial attitude, an accusatory
stance and a technique of singling out individual singers for scathing
criticism. The unlucky chorister who finds him/herself facing such a tyrant is
likely to form constructs which predict musical failure. I have even known some
disgruntled singers who deliberately sabotaged a performance in order to
retaliate against a conductor whom they construed as an autocrat, knowing that
the conductor could not scold them in performance as he had done in rehearsal. Fortunately
the curmudgeonly type of conductor seems less common these days.
When the singer finds him/herself under the
direction of a conductor who is more inclined to ask the choristers to
cooperate with him or her in achieving the conductor’s vision of a choral work
rather than wresting it from them, the singers will likely construe the
conductor as one to be consulted, listened to and respected both as musician
and as guide. Even though he/she can indeed often distinguish individual
voices, the conductor who does not single out choristers for individual
criticism but addresses his comments to the voice section to whom the
individual belongs will earn eternal gratitude from the singer and a resolve to
correct the problem of which the singer is no doubt very well aware. Under the
direction of a conductor who uses intelligence, wit and tact to achieve the
results he wants, chorus members will come to predict that they will be well
prepared for performances and will be able to approach performances with
assurance, enthusiasm and joy.
The conductor who is willing to take a few
minutes of rehearsal time to discuss relevant points of music theory will be
construed by most singers as a mentor as well as a director. The Devil’s
Tritone for instance can be devilishly hard to sing, and a few minutes
discussion about the diabolus in musica
along with a brief history of it and its recent use in choral works can be
invaluable to novice singers.
A problem can arise for a choral singer
when he/she becomes accustomed to working with one conductor for a long period
of time and occasionally sings with another chorus. I became very aware of this,
because I frequently joined other choruses to sing a variety of works and found
that the constructs I held of my home chorus and conductor did not always serve
me well in the new venue, leaving me with my musical predictions invalidated. This
experience has given me new respect for touring musical artists who must
constantly perform with different orchestras and conductors, construe and
predict musical and other elements which will affect their performance.
CONSTRUING
THE PIANO ACCOMPANIST
The rehearsal pianist is a very important
person in the chorister’s life. A really excellent rehearsal pianist not only
knows and can perform the music to the conductor’s specifications but anticipates
problems and is ready to help the conductor by discreetly furnishing key notes
to voice sections and by playing in tempo and with no errors one, two, three or
four voice parts to allow the singers to hear the melodies and harmonies of the
parts. When the pianist is also the concert accompanist a bond forms between
the singers and the pianist in which they construe her as a reliable anchor,
and learn to depend on her.
THE
CHORUS AS A SOCIETY
As I tried to construe the music and the
other musicians who were also trying to construe the music and each other, I
began to feel that I was, metaphorically speaking, in a hall of mirrors in
which the reflections of constructs bounced off all the shiny surfaces and
collided with each other in a confusing barrage of light without form. How to
make sense of it all? Then I remembered Kelly’s Sociality Corollary (1955, pp. 95-102)
and began to sort out my constructions: The conductor, I decided, very likely
believed that he construed his orchestra, chorus and rehearsal pianist at a
higher level of generality than they construed him, and could therefore construe,
anticipate, and control their behavior better than they could construe, anticipate,
and control his, thereby bolstering his confidence that he was truly in control
of his musical world. It would probably have come as a surprise to him that at
least some of those ranged hierarchically below him viewed themselves as higher
level construers who had a better understanding of the music and the conductor
than he himself had, setting the stage for, at the best, challenges to
interpretation, and at the worst, musical mutiny. This leads us to an
examination of the social milieu of the chorus.
Perhaps the
population of some choruses is not so diverse as that of my beloved home chorus.
Numbering from seventy to one hundred voices at various times, our ranks
included, first of all, a large group of college students. Ranging from
freshmen to seniors, some were music majors, others just liked to sing, or
decided to join because a friend had done so. Next there were faculty members
of the college from all disciplines – oddly enough, there was only one who was
a member of the Department of Music. Then there were several choristers who
were music professionals – teachers of music in primary and secondary schools
and directors of music at local churches. Many of these singers were choral
directors in their own right and therefore had definite ideas about how any
given choral work should be performed. Another group was composed of former
undergraduate music majors who had chosen to work in other fields. And finally
there were several (including myself) who had varying degrees of training and
interest in music, had sung in other choirs, and had joined this one simply
because they loved music and loved to sing.
I thought that the conductor surveying us
as we stood before him at opening rehearsal must have had some doubts about
being able to discipline this motley crew into a cohesive chorus, but as time
went on I saw that he did not appear to have any anxieties. Evidently he saw us
as singers who were there because we wanted to sing and sing well, and so he
predicted success.
In addition to the divisions among us
described above, we were necessarily divided into voices: soprano, alto, tenor,
and bass. The usual stereotypes surfaced as each voice part construed the
other. Altos saw the sopranos as a group of prima donnas whose vocal range was
about half an octave less than the high-voiced ones believed it to be, and saw
tenors as being as insecure in their range as the sopranos but not quite as
bright, while basses were construed as stolid, emotionless but necessary
drones. Sopranos, on the other hand, construed altos as wanna-be sopranos who
resented their more fortunate sisters who got to sing the melody more often,
while they construed the tenors as high-flyers like themselves, and the basses
as necessary drones. Tenors construed the sopranos as second in importance only
to themselves; barely noticed that the alto section existed, and construed the
basses as necessary drones. Basses construed themselves as the foundation of
the chorus, saw the altos as nice sensible singers who knew their place (some
of whom could even read the bass line). Sopranos and tenors seemed to them to
stand by to add an occasional fillip of decoration at the whim of the composer
and/or conductor. These stereotypical constructions, when they were voiced, were
usually spoken in a humorous manner, with an understanding that they did not
really reflect reality in our chorus. Nevertheless, stationed in the alto
section I would often hear murmurs of, “The sopranos are screeching again.” “The
tenors have lost it.” Or, “Are the basses asleep?” I’m sure the other sections
similarly commented on the faults of the alto section.
Fortunately our conductor was quite capable
of handling these murmurings and dissatisfactions. “Not bad,” he would say
after we had sung a passage. “Now do you think we could try it again with some
attention to pitch, tempo and dynamics?” And after we had done so, he would
say, “Now, sopranos . . . .” And on he would go, hearing each section at a
time, then joining soprano and tenor, soprano and alto, alto and bass, tenor
and bass, until we began to construe ourselves as one harmony in four, or six,
or eight parts, each singing the right notes at the right time at the right
volume and with the right spirit.
THE GEOGRAPHY
OF THE CHORAL SINGER’S WORLD
Where one sits or stands in relation to
other singers is of some importance to the chorister. I noticed with interest
during my student and teaching years, that students entering a classroom, or singers
entering a rehearsal room, will almost always choose a seat in the same
relative location, and so it was with seating in our rehearsal room. Somehow a
person seeking a position within a group construes a particular seat as the one
most likely to offer some advantage within the group. During the first few
years of my membership in the chorus, we rehearsed in the auditorium where we
were to perform, seated on stage on folding chairs which were arranged in
several rows arcing across the boards. We would begin our rehearsals standing
in front of our chairs during the warm up, then sit for a while and then stand again
when we were ready to sing a passage well. Every year, although we were not
told where to sit, except that we should sit within our voice section, the same
people chose the same seats. After a few years we moved to a new rehearsal hall
which had been constructed behind the performance hall. This room was built as
an amphitheater with rows of comfortable upholstered theater seats rising up
from the stage upon which the conductor and our accompanist at her piano were
arranged. It was a very different arrangement from the seats on stage in the
performance hall in which the conductor’s podium and the pianist at her piano were
at the same level as the singers. Still, in the new rehearsal hall, the singers
chose to sit in the same relative locations they had chosen in the earlier situation,
sitting beside, in front of, or in back of the same people. We were used to the
voices around us and construed the various abilities and faults of those voices
and could therefore predict their behavior. Knowing that Alice Ann behind me
often was flat in bar x, allowed me to anticipate that and not allow it to
throw me. If I got lost in the Hallelujahs, as I sometimes did if I let my mind
wander, I knew that Beverly
beside me would pick me up by pointing to the right spot in her score.
But when we moved to the risers on the
performance stage during the last several rehearsals before performance, our
cozy relationships were often disrupted. Now our conductor would survey the
assembled chorus and arrange us within each section according to height as well
as voice. This meant that we often found ourselves surrounded by voices that
were strange to us, and for the few rehearsals before performance we would feel
some anxiety, even though we were well rehearsed and knew that our physical or
geographical location in the chorus should not matter. We had to construe those
strange voices and get comfortable with them.
And when the concert was to be accompanied
by the orchestra, there were more adjustments to make. We had become accustomed
to rehearsing with piano accompaniment. Now we found ourselves on the risers,
crowded together under hot lights, with the orchestra arrayed in front of us,
distancing us physically, and we feared, psychologically and musically, from
the director. It always seemed to us, that we needed to sing louder in order to
be heard above the orchestra which had now elbowed its way between us and the
audience. The earnest assurances of our conductor that this was not so did not
relieve our anxiety until trusted musical scouts were placed strategically
around the auditorium, seated in audience seats, and reported that the chorus
was coming through clearly.
The chorus could then relax and enjoy the
excitement and elation that resulted from our few rehearsals with the
orchestra. The sense of high energy began with the orchestra’s tuning up so
that by the time we were ready to sing in rehearsal and in performance our
adrenalin levels were sky high.
EMOTION
AND MUSIC
It has always seemed to me that music is
the epitome of emotion. Eric Button (2006) has recently discussed a construct
view of emotion and music upon which I shall build here.
Some of my strong minded modern musical
friends pooh-pooh the idea of emotion in music and believe that musical
structure and the intellectual understanding of it is the basis for music
appreciation (music as a kind of tonal sudoku?) and opine that emotion should
be left out of it – well, largely anyhow. I think they mistake sentimentality
for emotion. Viennese schmaltz, my
father called it. When, at the age of ten, I begged to be taken to a Fritz
Kreisler concert, my father snorted “Viennese
schmaltz.” Nevertheless my mother took me to the concert (the first I had
ever attended). It was a sold-out house, and the only seats available were on
the stage. How lucky can you get! There
I was, two feet from the great violinist, totally enraptured by him and his
music. I can still remember the intense joy and sadness and longing I felt at
that concert. I am happy to say that the modern assessment of Kreisler’s
playing and his music does not include anything like the evaluation, Viennese schmaltz.
I am being so personal about this subject
because our emotional response to music is intensely personal. Of course we
share constructs of what is happy or sad or angry in music and we share
understanding of the musical techniques – key (major or minor), tempo, dynamics,
etc. – which help composers and performers create those emotional effects, but
beyond that there is something that is hard to analyze. It seems to hinge on personal
experience and memories and, I believe, to get back to Personal Construct
Psychology, on preverbal and perhaps nonverbal constructs.
One of my most intense personal emotional
experiences of music happened when our chorus began to rehearse Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem. I had of course
heard the Requiem many times, but when we came
to the fourth section “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen,” something strange
happened. As I sang the words Wie
lieblich an intense memory seemed to explode in my mind, transporting me
back to our family rose garden on what seemed to be a June afternoon. I was
three or four years old and saw the garden from my child’s perspective. I could
feel the sun on my head and shoulders and hear the humming of insects. I became
aware that my German grandmother was walking beside me, holding my hand as we
admired the rose bushes in full bloom, and I heard her melodious voice which is
the main thing I can remember about her, for she died when I was only six. Did
she really say the words wie lieblich?
Admiring the roses, she might well have done. Did she prompt me to say those
words? Is that why the physical act of singing those words brought about this intense
memory? I had listened to the phrase before and had never experienced this
memory until I actually sang it.
I
came to myself, realizing that Beverly sitting next to me was looking at me
questioningly. I evidently hadn’t been singing for several bars and she was
wondering why. I shrugged and she pointed to our place in the score and I began
singing again, still a bit overwhelmed by the memory or whatever it was that I
had experienced. I only know that, thinking back on it now after many years,
the emotion that I experienced and still experience is compounded of grief for
the loss of my grandmother so early in my life, joy at the momentary sense of
being with her again, and finally consolation – which is what Ein deutsches Requiem is all about. Brahms
couldn’t have foreseen my idiosyncratic reaction, but he is entitled to my
thanks for it.
One emotion that all musical performers
experience is performance anxiety (Burr, 2006). It is different for choral
singers than for soloists, for each of us knows that the audience is not likely
to detect one singer’s flat note or missed entrance. Our anxiety is, as George
Kelly would say, that errors would challenge our core constructs of ourselves
as musicians (Kelly, 1955, Vol. I, pp. 502-505). We do not want to feel guilt
because we have let ourselves down, nor do we want to let down the team of
which we are a part, nor our conductor (and by now, each of us is absolutely convinced
that he can distinguish our individual voices) and so each of us worries about
whether we have construed our voice – our instrument – well and can rely on our
predictions of a successful performance.
There are minor anxieties too: Will I begin
coughing during “The Lacrymosa?” Where can I stow my cough drops? The lights
are so hot up here on the stage and we are so crowded on the risers that I
wonder if I can breathe – will I faint? Once the performance begins, all of these
anxieties disappear and we focus on the music. During the performance the
emotions we feel are complex. One component of our affect is of course derived
from the music. It is a very different experience to sing the Brahms Schicksalslied compared to the Borodin Polvetsian Dances, but in addition to
the emotion characteristic of the particular selection there is the elation
that a rush of adrenalin brings. There is a feeling of freedom and of mastery,
a feeling of almost palpable energy that arises from us and from the orchestra
and is controlled by our focus on our conductor.
CONSTRUING
SUCCESS AND FAILURE
Fortunately the applause of the audience
and the smiles and congratulations of our conductor after performances reassured
us that we had sung a successful concert. And usually we could all relax and enjoy
the afterglow. But once in a while we had to admit to a certain degree of
failure. In my fifteen years with my home chorus there was only one selection
that truly flummoxed us, and that was “Old Joe has Gone Fishing” from Benjamin
Britten’s Peter Grimes. What was it
about “Old Joe” that escaped us? Was it the odd 7/4 time signature? Was it the
song being taken out of the context of the opera? Or something else? Looking
back on it, I think, that perhaps if I now ask how it was like something else
we sang and different from another piece, I can place a construct on it to
account for our inability to deal with it. It is somewhat like a folk song, and
we sang many folk songs, but of course it isn’t really a folk song. But it is about fishing and the sea. Now let me
see, what else did we sing about fishing and the sea? Ah, yes, Beethoven’s
charming setting of the Scottish song, “Swiftly Glides the Bonny Boat.” No,
it’s not in the least like that! Maybe it’s like something else in 7/4 time. I
can’t think of anything else in 7/4 time. Maybe another opera chorus? Perhaps
it is just that it was like nothing else we ever sang. I finally have to come
to the conclusion that we just couldn’t get the feeling for it without the
setting in the opera – the wind and storm outside, the triviality of this song meant
to distract the people in the tavern contrasted to the brewing confrontation
that foreshadows the doom of the boy and Peter Grimes. That might explain our
inability to capture the emotion but doesn’t exactly explain why at performance
the sopranos, altos and tenors were consistently about two bars ahead of the
basses, but it is a close as I can come to an explanation.
CONCLUSION
In spite of the complexities and
perplexities that sometimes distanced us from the music – or perhaps because we
learned to overcome them – we choral singers experienced elation, a sense of
mastery, and a tremendous sense of satisfaction and joy both in rehearsal and
in performance. These emotions arose from a complex of factors. That we all
loved to sing goes without saying, but I believe that the best part of our
multifaceted delight came from our having learned to construe, predict and
control in our little world of music. When we came to the rehearsal or
performance hall we left behind our everyday worries and the anxieties that
plagued us in the real world and for an hour our two could live in a world of
music in which we were confident that we were prepared and could foresee the
successful outcome of our music making while still finding infinite varieties
of musical experience in each rehearsal and performance.
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REFERENCES |
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| Burr, V. (2006). Becoming a singer: PCT and
voice. In J. W. Scheer & K. W. Sewell (Eds.). Creative Construing (pp. 120-126). Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag.
Button, E. (2006). Music and the person. In
J. W. Scheer & K. W. Sewell (Eds.). Creative
Construing (pp. 88-98). Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag.
Kelly, G. A. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs. Vols. 1 & 2. New York: Norton
Whitehead, C. (Ed.) (1991). Constructive Criticism: A Journal of
Construct Psychology and the Arts, Vols. 1-4. Gambier, Ohio: Constructive Publishing, Inc. | |
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ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Cintra Whitehead holds an interdisciplinary
doctorate in psychology and English literature and has taught in both
fields. For a time she was publisher and
contributing editor of Constructive
Criticism: A Journal of Construct
Psychology and the Arts. Retired
from teaching, she now lives in Ocala,
Florida with her husband Jim and
their cats Bonnie and Minnaloushe. She
continues to work as a freelance writer and lecturer, concentrating on
psychological literary criticism, critical theory, and personality theory.
Email: cdb.w.cc@embarqmail.com.
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REFERENCE
Whitehead, C. (2009). It isn't just the music: A PCP view of the complexities, perplexities and joys of choral singing. Personal
Construct Theory & Practice, 6, 42-50, 2009
(Retrieved from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp09/whitehead09.html)
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Received: 1 October 2008 – Accepted: 26 January 2009 –
Published: 20 March 2009
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