June, 2005
Volume 20, No. 3

Contents:

Soup And Song

The View From Here

Recent Publications of Alice Parker

From the Fellows

Home Page
The News Stand

SOUP AND SONG
Editorial

We just finished a wonderful Songleading Week, with eight Fellows in residence and much song, discussion, hard work, laughter and eating. I'm reminded again how difficult it is for trained professionals to adapt to my way of thinking about melody. It seems so simple and self-evident to me that I tend to forget that it's taken my whole life to arrive at this point, and will take others a good while to adjust their thinking. It's been almost a journey from my childish intuitive response to a song, through all the thickets of mindful training for composing, performing and teaching, adding on the years of experience in these and all the other facets of my life, before I can come back to the intuitive, child-like, immediate response which signifies "mindless knowing" (Heschel's phrase). It encloses all the rational knowledge, but these are at the service of the intuitive, rather than the other way around.

Let me give an example. At our final meal together, we sang, as a grace, "Let us Break Bread Together on our Knees." I began it with a strong beat, in what I think of as the "New Orleans jazz" style: a solo clarinet, perhaps, and then the response of all the other instruments in the Preservation Hall band. The others joined in instantly, responding to the sung-but-unspoken demands of the song, and we sang all three verses in a wild free-flow. Almost cacophony to the listener: but no one was listening. We were all in it together, listening to the tune, responding to its style, mood, content and text, listening to and trading ideas with each other. It held all the energy of creation, and was intensely satisfying music-making.

What we'd been studying all week was the ability to focus completely on what we were hearing at the moment: one person sings the tune, the others react to this performance, rather than the abstract symbols which signify it on the page. It seems to me that my formal musical education was principally concerned with the page: score reading, technical terms and nomenclature, reading and writing 'about' the music, rather than learning to make it 'sing'. That came only (or principally) when I worked with Shaw and Herford - stern demanders of pure sound every second. I slowly learned to step into the sound, as one steps into a pool of water. To swim, one must trust the medium and work with it, not fight against it. The same with sound: one must forget everything except those vibrations which bring the music to life, and ride them, rising and falling with their currents.

So, we'd experimented with all kinds of melodies, trying to make them flow in curving arcs of phrase, expressed through our individual (and very different) voices. The bottom line is getting that melody right all by itself. When it engages the whole room we can begin to build a structure on it, finding other lines which complement, release and sustain it. The traditional response has been to harmonize: to sound the chords implied by the tune.

But is this what the melody wants? I think only tonal music demands to be harmonized; that's included in the whole concept of tonality. But if the melody is pentatonic, or modal, and particularly if it can be sung over a pedal or drone (bagpipes), there is no harmonic compulsion, and the melody is presented with an overlay of style which most often obscures the nature of the tune itself.

Here's the soup analogy. On your kitchen range you have four pots of well-seasoned soup stock: one based on chicken broth, one tomato, one with Latino spices, and one Asian-flavored. You hold in your hand your chicken, ready to immerse. Which pot do you choose? It's possible to make a tasty and satisfying meal out of any of these: the chicken (the song) stays the same as you drop it in the pot, but it is completely flavored by its surroundings.

Thus with our arrangements - harmonizations - settings - improvisations - of familiar melodies. In the hymnal, they are mostly harmonized note- for-note, chords changing each beat (chorale-style): thus they sound similar, familiar, comfortable. But the tunes aren't all tonal. Our ears get deadened by constant exposure to one style, and we no longer hear the original melody. Or, if we're committed to a contemporary gospel style, we can subject any tune to that kind of rhythmic, chromatic accompaniment. We can go country-western with guitars, or Caribbean with steel drums, or Asian with gongs and xylophones. The tune stays the same, but sounds completely different.

The salient question is: which kind of setting is most natural for the tune? My answer is to draw the materials of the setting from the tune itself, using only the words, rhythms and pitches contained in the song. Who sang it first? How? Where? When? Can we get back to a first version? (This is always intuitive with a folksong: there is no one definitive source, only variants.) When we improvise around this melody, can we listen so intently that we respond as an echo-chamber would, using only the elements which are already vibrating in the air?

That's the huge challenge. Of course it comes out different every time, and can be exciting or scary or heart-wrenchingly simple or soaringly mystical. What we're after is that experience of stepping into the song so completely that all else ceases: only the sound-waves beckoning us on. We're listening not only to the song, but the totality of our response to it, making our voices circle round each other as the whole encloses the song.

One can't learn that from books. It can't be notated on a page. We always have the option of playing it safe and tip-toeing across the surface of the song - or we can put it in the pot of our choice - or we can abandon caution and rules, surrendering to the human experience evoked in the melody. There's no doubt about my choice!

Alice Parker

Table of Contents

THE VIEW FROM HERE
Sudden Change

The word for this Spring was "unexpected". Around the beginning of April we always get a hunger for new green, as pansies appear in the Connecticut River Valley where trees bud two or three weeks before ours in the Hilltowns. When the sun shines and the temperature is in the 60's we rejoice, throwing aside the winter clothing, opening doors and windows and wheeling out the charcoal grill.

Such a spell occurred in mid-month, when I was packing for a 10-day trip. So I chose light-weight clothing and looked forward to spring in West Virginia. The first day was sunny and colorful, with real leaves and tulips and lilacs of every shade. But by the next afternoon - you guessed it - it snowed. It snowed in Lewisburg and in Roanoke and in Minneapolis on May 1st. . . not really surprising but rather disheartening.

Home, in May, was cold all month, with record amounts of rain and a hard frost on the 20th. The daffodils lasted all month in the frigid air, but nothing else grew: even the weeds and the bugs were slow to appear. But by Memorial Day weekend the sun came out, my tiny plantings of herbs and tomatoes and flowers were drying out, and trees popped almost instantly from bud to full leaf. The apple blossoms, hurrying to catch up, went through their bloom cycle in about three days.

Every year I forget how my horizons close in when the leaves grow. All winter I see through the skeletal branches to the enfolding lines of hills, with their muted blues and grays. Now, I'm hemmed in by green on every side - every shade from a shameless pistachio to the most soothing depth of sun-speckled shadow. My struggling lilacs and rhubarb are finally thriving - and I have no doubt that in two weeks I'll be complaining of the heat. We live fast, here in the Hills!

Note from two weeks later: We've had an unprecedented hot spell, with muggy heat in the 80's for over a week. It feels like late July - corn weather! Now rain is much needed - preferably not the wind-whipped thunderstorm variety. It makes me wonder what July will bring. . .

Alice Parker

Table of Contents

Recent Publications of Alice Parker

Table of Contents

FROM THE FELLOWS

"I have learned. . .that the clues to 'teaching' a song or arranging a song are contained in the song itself rather than on the page. You don't just shake hands with the song; you need to embrace it and live with it long enough that it confides in you. . . .I can use it everywhere I do music: performing, composing, even singing with my kids, introducing new material to my congregation or inspiring their singing of "traditional" hymns."

David Poole

"Just when I think I have all my musical ducks in a row, Alice gathers them in her arms, tosses them in the air and lets them tumble on the floor in such a way that I see plainly the musician I sorely am and the musician I gladly would prefer to be. Alice draws the Fellows further away from responsibility to notation by welcoming them into the realm of song, that indefatigable pairing of text and melody, not as solely melodious entities but as the result of the multi-faceted human experience."

Lucille Reilly

Table of Contents

Watch for our special 20th Anniversary issue of the Melodious Accord Newsletter.
Coming in November!

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