On Sunday night, the BBC will broadcast the final of its Young Musician of the Year competition. Contests between the country’s most un/talented people are a near constant source of TV entertainment, so I tuned in to last week’s semi finals to see what makes this show different from all the others.
The man we often look to in these situations, Simon Cowell, was absent, which seemed something of an innovation in televised competition. There were the same earnest youths of course, although the classicists are a little more melodramatic than their X-factor rivals. In between the awkward talking heads there was time for a good deal of music and plenty of talent to rank.
Perhaps I missed Cowell more than expected though, as trying to sort the night’s performers into their order of merit was harder than expected. Choosing between half a dozen brilliantly gifted people was not only difficult, it asked serious questions about what, as an audience, we look for in performance, how we define greatness in art and even how we interpret music with our ears.
Such questions are not limited to music of course – pub debates on ‘the greatest’ extend to nearly every area of life. Yet the dilemma is particularly palpable when, at such an early stage in their lives, the studies are so accomplished. And therein lay the first dilemma; how do we rank skill?
Let me ask, in the great scheme of things, how important is technique, the handling of an instrument? Often enough it seems the knack of making a noise from the damn thing is a source of wonderment, and whenever we hear a piece of music proficiency is something we recognise. Reputations like Jimi Hendrix’s are built on ability foremost, his legacy as someone who could ‘play’ more reaching than his other credentials. The guitar apparently lends itself to braggadocio because it has produced a string of instrumentalists lauded for their dexterity. In the ‘80s many of its players seemed intent on playing as quickly and precisely as possible.
In the Young Musician of the Year competition there was a more tempered kind of flair in abundance. These were young people who had dedicated hours and hours a day to practising and refining their muscle memory. Embouchures had been perfected and fingers strengthened through endless rehearsal, and all done around the business of going to school, making friends etc. If we were to go on skill alone, however, we would measure accuracy in a mathematical way, with a stop watch and metronome. The fact is that aptitude, a feature of learning an instrument, becomes less of a consideration once a certain standard is reached. “Forget everything you’ve learnt,” the be-boppers once implored, “and just play what’s on your mind.”
Which brings about the second dilemma, and how we quantify the “playing of the mind”. An expression that comes not from practice or technique, this nameless quality has become the basis on which most popular music is made today. The lack of skill in today’s young musicians is another discussion entirely, but one can’t fault the punks or the bedroom musicians for pandering to our respect of the ‘x factor’. A lack of surety can produce remarkable results on an instrument – John Lee Hooker’s strangely compelling meter, John Cale’s atonal violin on The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan’s singing…. All of these are a triumph of ineptitude, a celebration of incompetence. They are also some of the most important musicians we have heard.
The candidates for Young Musician of the Year gave a reminder of the importance in balancing these two opposing considerations, precision and emotion. As an audience we rate our connection to musicians and our opinion on their skills almost subconsciously, but for these young professionals a conscious effort has to be made to mould the two into a performance. It’s a lot to ask of people with such little life experience to draw on.
CLR James, author of Beyond a Boundary, is oft quoted for his famous line “What do they of cricket know, they who only cricket know?” It came to mind watching these young talents who have honed their ability and aspire to be the best. They are virtuosos for sure. But what can they know about the music they are playing when life revolves around homework and practice? What can they know of the strange love Chopin felt for George Sand, or the pain Beethoven suffered at losing his hearing? I had always assumed that the intangible aspects of performance, of connecting to and drawing emotion from an audience, relied a certain amount on firsthand experience. Can you really convey the emotion of love if you haven’t loved? How to make an audience believe in heartache if you don’t know how it feels yourself?
Very rarely, it seems, it is possible – a young Stevie Wonder for instance or an even younger Mozart. Could they have been guessing at emotions, or did they have a strange understanding of things they’d yet to face? Who knows, but more often than not it seems true that with age comes the ability to connect with people, the primary goal of the performer. The BBC’s young musicians were brilliant but age is not on their side, experience is yet to shape them as performers and there was too often something missing from their offerings.
So, how to decide a winner on Sunday evening? Will it be the most skilful or will it be the most emotional? No doubt the panel will find their winner but one thing is for certain, that for the disappointed there is still plenty of time. Because in the end it is the experience of life itself that will make them great.
Picture Courtesy of ninafrazier
Read More:
1 comment
Jonathan says:
May 17, 2010
Nice article. However, I disagree that the ability to connect with people emotionally comes with age because people gain more experience of emotions themselves. If only simply having experienced particular emotions were sufficient to reproduce them in a performance!
I think there are a couple things to remember here. Firstly, emotion experienced from music is very individual. What one person experiences from a particular performance may be very different to what another experiences from the same.In a way, we project our *own* feelings onto whatever happens to be played to us. Thus, it doesn’t actually matter if the performer hasn’t actually experienced say, love. All that matters is that the performer knows intuitively how to play something musically, and individual audience members will get from that whatever they choose to see in it. Sometimes I actually wonder if there is a sort of placebo effect going on, whereby the expectation that a performer is young and immature drives us to hear less in their performance.
The second thing is that actually putting individuality into music is a question of the mental maturity to actually do it. This is a subtle point. It takes great focus to think individually about every note and every phrase throughout a whole performance, but this is exactly what is required, in practice as well as in performance. To keep focusing in this way is an almost zen like skill that takes years of practice to achieve, over and above the years it requires to achieve your basic level of technical capability. It is much easier just to leave a lot of it up to muscle memory, and let the notes play themselves. The problem with this is that the nuances are lost. Nobody practices enough that every last detail is ingrained into muscle memory – and anyway, to do so would require the same skill as just described in the first place! Nor would it be desirable, because of course the performance should to some extent be judged and matched to the particular occasion.
I was happy with the choice of winner. I didn’t think the judges were actually doing Callum any favors by putting him through this year. Had he been given another opportunity to come back in 2 or even 4 years time, I think he would have stood a much better chance of winning.