Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

Have a look at Benjamin Zander’s enthusiastic TED talk on classical music (and much more).

Thanks to Ewan for flagging up this inspirational talk on education and change by Sir Ken Robinson. It coincided with his being presented with the Benjamin Franklin Medal on Monday. Sponsored by Edge (not that one, the other one), the talk, given at the RSA is available in mp3 format for the moment, with a video to follow here soon. Although slides are referred to in the talk, you can get by without visuals - with the possible exception of the moment where Earth is compared to other stars & planets.

If you haven’t already seen it, I can’t recommend highly enough Ken Robinson’s TED talk. His book Out Of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative, is on my reading list.

Slightly more than one year after the idea was mooted, I managed to visit Robert Jones class in NBHS to observe a whiteboard in action*. A Credit Maths class was tightening its grip on the law of indices. Not only was I impressed with the effortless and effective use of the many functions of the whiteboard, but also with the Activote apparatus. This handheld, wireless tool enabled the class to vote on a multiple choice answer – the results being instantly called up in bar-chart form. My first thought on seeing this was that it would encourage uncertain pupils to engage, as it seemed anonymous. I say seemed as the stats are available to the teacher, enabling him/her to see if anyone is struggling or excelling. They are, it turns out, also available to the class if they so vote.

All the observation I’ve done to date has been serendipitous and usually takes the form of over-hearing/eavesdropping while printing from a computer in a Music classroom. What I tend to notice, possibly more than content, is language – not only the words but the tune. What appears to me to be best practice involves simple language**, quietly expressed. And this seems as true of classroom management as of delivery of lesson content. And it was certainly true yesterday. Drifting individuals were swiftly spotted and nudged back on task - sotto voce; the balance of praise, encouragement and prompting felt just right.

There is no formal mechanism for instrumental instructors to engage in observation. As far as I know, there is no formal mechanism for teachers to observe one another once probationary years have passed. However, based on yesterday’s experience, I feel it to be valuable for several reasons:

• there seem to me to be more common principles than significant differences across the curriculum - any primary teacher would tell you that teaching is teaching
• when you’ve taught your own subject for some years, there is perhaps more to be learned from observing the teaching of other subjects – any inspired moments I’ve experienced in the last few years have had their origins in fields other than music
• it’s unusual to see your pupils in another learning situation and, given our in loco parentis status, this strikes me as a little odd

* What was nice about this visit was that the idea came round again after we’d played through a few mandolin and guitar tunes at lunchtime

** While the pupils were engaged in a few exercises, I took the opportunity to pick up a book I’d spotted on Robert’s desk entitled The Physics of Sailing Explained, and read a few pages of the chapter on the weather and why it exists. This impressive read was the perfect compliment to the situation – concise, unambiguous sentences in the right order. It seemed so easy you felt you could have written it yourself.

Despite having been a pupil at Knox for 5 years and having taught there at least one day-per-week for 25.5 years, the first time I sat through an entire concert in the school hall was last Friday. Normally, I’m on stage or backstage with pupils or en route between the two.

So it was a real pleasure to sit, free of duties, through a Lamp of Lothian concert featuring the O Duo. The duo comprises former Knox lad, Oliver Cox and musical partner, Owen Gunnell, on percussion – yes, it’s a percussion duo.

The presentation and the patter of duo was very inviting and the playing both entertaining and virtuosic. With the boys’ blessing, I recorded the concert as an aide memoir to writing a review which the Lamp of Lothian will submit to The East Lothian Courier.

It then occurred to me that posting a couple of samples here might benefit:

• The O Duo – encouraging people to check out the concert dates & CD on their website
• The Lamp of Lothian – an example of one of the many concerts they put on throughout the year – entry to which is free for pupils
• Knox Academy – perhaps an under-rated and over-looked venue – these mp3 samples were recorded on a Zoom H2 at the back of the hall

Hopefully these short samples will prove that there’s more to a percussion duo than hitting things with sticks.

Bongo Fury (composed by O Duo); Bongo Fury Alborada del Gracioso (Ravel); Alborada Courante Courante & Gigue Gigue from French Suite No. 5 in G BWV 816 (Bach); Etude in C# minor, Op. 10 No. 4; Chopin Sonata No. 90 (Soler); Soler Flight of the Bumblebee; (Rimsky-Korsakov); Flight of BB

Got a spare 15 minutes? Would you like to take part in a national, online survey about how people listen to music? The mission of Feeling Sound Musiclab is to test how we perceive music – and also to gauge the nation’s favourite chord – the result of which will be used to commission a new piece of music.

Why not read about the project, about the staff involved or take the test?

What constitutes the perfect voice? Is it totally subjective or can the ingredients be isolated and described objectively?

According to research carried out on behalf of Post Office Telecom it is possible to be very precise about this. Perhaps not surprisingly, the research was carried by two people who can count music among the many strings on their bows:

• Andrew Linn – lecturer in linguistics and phonetics at Sheffield University, and accomplished organist
• Shannon Harris -sound engineer and keyboard player with, among others, Lily Allen and Rod Stewart.

Shannon Harris, speaking to James Naughtie on Radio 4’s Today described the research procedure. Fifty unknown voices were played to participants and the common traits of favoured voices noted:

1. good bass frequency response – between 35.5Hz and 12.2 KHz
2. a delivery speed 160 words per minute – with a gap of 0.5 sec between phrases
3. an intonation contour which goes downwards! (take note, fans of AQI/HRT – no not that one, the other one*)

This information proved sufficient to synthesise the perfect male and female voice, both of which can be heard here.

Presumably to give these findings some popular meaning, well known voices featuring some or all of these were listed. They included:

• Judi Dench
• Michael Gambon
• Mariella Frostrup
• Alan Rickman
• Jeremy Irons

You’ll note the complete absence of national/regional accents and also of context. Would dozens of orators using RP or SBS be suitable in the Scottish Parliament or Welsh Assembly? Would Alan Rickman make a convincing drill sergeant? Could Juni Dench comfortably MC a Hip-Hop festival?

James Naughtie asserted - correctly in my view - that what people were looking for was a voice, reading with understanding and meaning. In the context of teaching, an individual teacher’s delivery would surely change depending on where in the 3-18 continuum they were placed.

It seems clear that the voice was being regarded as an de-contextualised instrument. No composer would cite any single instrument as the perfect one without knowing the setting and the emotional intention. The harpsichord is not a great instrument for marching to war and bagpipes are rarely booked for dinner jazz.

*Stephen Fry consigned Australian Questioning Intonation aka High Rising Terminal to Room 101 on BBC 2. Interestingly the researchers report that this sound suggests a lack of confidence. Viewed thus, it is not surprising that is is mainly the domain of teenagers for whom fitting in and confidence are big issues. Contrastingly, David Crystal, a prolific writer on language, considers that AQI is favoured by young people as it sounds inviting and inclusive and because, generally, young people are more interested in meeting new people and making new friends than older people whose family and social networks are perhaps happily in place.

How good is your ear for accents? How different do you think one word could sound in a variety of accents? A new interactive site entitled Sound Comparisons by Edinburgh University in conjunction with the Arts & Humanities Research Council allows you to hear the same word uttered in dozens of accents. I tried out the word “brother” and was amazed at the differences.

Some of the pages are slow to load and using Firefox over Internet Explorer is recommended – but not as highly as downloading the entire site – which I’ve just done.

I’d say it’s impossible to cultivate a musical ear without being sensitive to the subtle changes in pitch and timbre which distinguish accents. Perhaps that’s why so many impressionists are musical.

An intensive Chopin weekend is underway on Radio 3 - details of programmes here. Interesting programmes include Discovering Music, which takes an analytical look at Chopin’s Four Ballades, and World Routes, which explores the folk music of Chopin’s native Poland.

The dedicated website contains tutorials, a profile and timeline of the composers life, video footage of performances, many external links and, for the interactively minded, an audio quiz. There is also a gallery of photographs relating to Chopin’s fraught holiday in Mallorca in 1838 with George Sand and her children. Sarah Walker’s programme about this goes out at 2:30 on Sunday afternoon.

One of the tutorials, given by David Owen Norris, outlines the difference between the type of piano for which Chopin wrote and present day pianos. Those familiar with the music will not be surprised to discover that the touch of pianos back then was lighter and shallower, light and rapid playing. Classical guitarists will be familiar with a similar situation. The music of Fernando Sor, Mauro Giuliani, Dionisio Aguado etc. was written for a guitar which was not only smaller than the modern version but had a much lighter action (less tension in the strings). There is an impressive collection of such guitar in the Anne Macaulay Collection of Plucked String Instruments which is housed (alongside other impressive collections) in Edinburgh’s St Cecilia’s Hall.

How loud is a decibel? This interactive site will give you some idea. What noise levels are endured by members of orchestras? This site has some interesting and detailed information. New European Union industrial (sic) legislation stipulates that employers must provide protection where noise levels in the workplace exceed 85 dB . This has brought about the phenomenon of bespoke ear plugs (paragraph 21) and some interesting technology (paragraphs 22 & 23). The issue of problematic noise levels has led to pieces being dropped from concert programmes.

According to this article a pipe band, playing at full volume outdoors, peaks at 122 dB. Is it possible musically to arouse national pride at 85dB? In 2005 I attended the Pipefest in Holyrood Park, where 10,000 pipers and drummers broke the Guiness World Record for simultaneous playing. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of spectators seated on the grass. At the sound of so many pipes starting up many people leapt to their feet - fuelled by raw emotion.

You can hear a report on the topic of musicians’ noise-at-work on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House (fast forward to 48 minutes in). It features the bitter irony of the EU anthem consisting of a theme from the Symphony No. 9 of Beethoven – who, by the end of his career, was profoundly deaf.

I once played in a band at a 50^th birthday party in The Johnny Cope, Prestonpans. The venue had in place a traffic light system of noise awareness:

• green = well within limits
• amber = getting near the upper limit – keep a lid on it
• red = you’ve overdone it – at which point the power would be cut for 30 seconds or so – it’s a situation you’d want to avoid.

The limit was breached only once. We were on a break, and a kissagram dressed as Tarzan had just entered the room.

I don’t normally watch BBC’s Young Musician of the Year – not because I don’t enjoy watching talented young people perform, but more because I find the competitive element a little distasteful. While I acknowledge that many a great career has been launched this way, I’d rather just enjoy the performance. This is now possible thanks to the BBC providing video footage. The videos contain far more of each soloist’s programme than broadcast time could possibly allow. May I recommend this fine performance by Jadran Duncumb on guitar. Once there, you’ll be able to navigate your way around the other performances and interviews.