Music and the Imagination: The Performer's Imagination

A busy schedule and a bad cold laid me low, and laid the blog low as a result, but I’ve turned the corner, and the hiatus allowed me to ponder the necessity of engaging the performer’s imagination in bringing music to life.  Music consists of symbols on a page, worthless unless someone knows how to crack the code and reproduce the sounds indicated.  But even if you know how to crack the code, is that enough?  Is simply reproducing the sounds all that is required to make a piece of music come to life?

Well, partly, at least as a starting point, but I’ve seen plenty of performances where the sounds were accurately reproduced but the result was pretty boring.  What was lacking?  The performer’s imagination!  If the performer’s imagination isn’t engaged the performance can quickly degenerate into an exercise in tedium.  And never is a singer’s imagination more needed than in La Guerre, one of the pieces in our upcoming Imaginarium concert.  It’s a dynamic sixteenth-century chanson that celebrates the victory of French forces over the Swiss in the battle of Marignon in 1515, and it is a tour de force of musical effects: booming cannons, zinging bow strings, cries of alarm, trumpet calls, thudding hooves, all characterized by the human voice.  It is also in Renaissance French, has no tempo or dynamics markings or accompaniment, uses gobs of polyphony (imitation among the voices—not easy stuff!), a number of emotionally charged meter changes, and is pretty lengthy, about six to seven minutes long.  Just to give you a glimpse, here is a page from the beginning of part 2.

On this page the battle is about to start; the armies send challenges to one another through drum rolls, blaring trumpets, and calls to muster arms and spur the horses onward.  But there are no instructions that come with this piece.  How do I convey this blur of notes to my singers?  How do we make a 500-year-old battle, draped in challenging musical guise, including hard-to-decipher sound effects, grab the singer’s, and thus the audience’s, imaginations? 

The creative interaction between singers and conductor is difficult to describe, but to begin, I get the music well into my inner “ear,” draw on my knowledge of Renaissance musical practices, read up on the battle and the composer, Clement Janequin, track down an accurate translation, match the translation word-for-word with the French, and see what language and music together reveal.  And, I shamelessly admit, I mine other performances!  There’s nothing like listening to performances to excite pictures in my mind.  And when the music begins to live and breathe in my own mind, I find every possible opportunity to enliven the mind’s eye of the singers, all while helping them over the myriad musical and linguistic challenges so that artistic magic can happen.  That’s the only way it can hope to have any meaning for the audience.

Does it work?  You’ll have to catch a performance, either ours or anyone’s, to see.  In the meantime, here’s an absolutely riveting performance by the King’s Singers.

Does it fire your imagination?

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic Director and Conductor

Master Chorus Eastside