9/40: Interpretation
Meditation and choir practice last night reminded me of the need to let go of assumptions, and of some of the flavours and colours of interpretation.
Thursdays are a delightful day for me. Even when they are busy with meetings, phone calls, and admin as yesterday was, they are more spacious. And there is the treat to anticipate at the close: group meditation followed (for me, anyway) by choir practice.
Yesterday we meditated then socialised in two spaces that were new to me, as temporarily the group has for logistic reasons shifted from the Cathedral. The meditation was in a charming little bookstore and the social time in a knitting store just a couple doors from that. Both are a short walk from the Cathedral and still on James North.
Being in new spaces helps you really notice your surroundings. Before meditation started, my eyes couldn’t help but explore some of the many book titles and other visually enticing aspects of the bookshop. I also felt warmly drawn into the knitting shop with its wildly colourful yarns, some of which looked incredibly soft and begged to be touched, though I held back and only adored them from a distance.
New people were there too, so it was interesting beginning to get to know them a bit and observing the eddies and currents of conversations as they flowed around the room while we enjoyed the cake one of the group members had brought and the beverages.
Along the way various assumptions I had held about the spaces from superficial glances from the outside walking by were shattered. For example a casual glance had given me no sense of how kindly each space would hold a meditation or social time. How much colour, joy, sensation, and wonder each shop contained. The peacefulness of the knitting shop made sense in retrospect considering the amount of time people must spend quietly and intently knitting there, but again it was a revelation.
A sixteenth century piece as interpreted by John Rutter and the Cambridge Singers, which we will sing in a few weeks
Translation
Choral singing can encompass a fair amount of lyrics written in other languages. The music we sing, when not in English, is generally in Latin. The director nearly always carefully translates the words for us line by line if the text is unfamiliar, and if he doesn’t, one of us generally pipes up to ask for a translation.
Theoretically you could sing music without understand the words, relying on fuzzy assumptions of what they might mean. But in order properly to interpret the music together, to convey the feelings, meanings, and subtleties of the piece, starting with a foundation of what the words are actually saying makes a whole lot of sense.
I discovered a number of times as I was listening to the translation and jotting down notes to remember it later that some words didn’t mean anything like what I might have guessed they did. My Latin is imperfect at best.
And right away, having a clearer grasp of the meaning of the words shed light on at least some of the dynamic decisions of the composer as well as the director’s interpretation as he began to sketch some of his intentions for the pieces.
To Interpret Music
One of the many things that I find fascinating about learning different languages is the dimensions of reality that they illuminate in a way that is missing or downplayed in one’s mother tongue.
I grew up in Montreal, a city which is far more bilingual that the rest of the province of Quebec. I went to French school enough years to gain fluency in the language as well as to learn some Spanish.
In French, when one speaks of playing a piece of music, it is said that one is ‘interpreting’ it. It’s true. I have sung a number of choral pieces with several different choirs under the direction of different men and women and each time what emerged was distinct.
In fact, one of my dearest choral memories is an excellent example of this. Before I left Montreal and before the death of Christopher Jackson, I attended a joint concert with his choir, the Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal, and the Tallis Scholars under the direction of Peter Phillips.
Both SMAM and the Tallis Scholars are superlative professional choirs and Christopher Jackson was an exceptional director, as is Peter Phillips. However, what blew me away listening to the concert was how the same group of singers when directed by Christopher or Peter had a very different sound. What each director brought to the same group of people was transformative in a way that was utterly unforgettable.
There was a piece of music we sang last night that the choir had sung many times in the past, and that I still remembered by heart though it’s been a decade or more since I last sang it. But knowing it as well as I did helped me not to have to look at the score, so I could listen more carefully to what everyone around me was singing, and watch the director continually to begin to perceive how he was interpreting it.
And simply hearing his frank admission that though this is such a well-known and often performed song, he loves it, gave the interpretation an energy that is hard to put into words or quantify.
Love changes everything. The love of choral music, the excitement and joy a director and choir bring to rehearsals and to the sight reading of choral music that can date back to the 16th century or even earlier, and the mastery that comes from the dedication to the craft: these and more leave assumptions about how one thinks a piece has sounded or will sound far away in the distance, in favour of a living, breathing interpretation that emerges through practice, a new thing that has never yet existed.
It Changes Everything
Rehearsal finished and the director and I went into his office where I carefully put away the music in preparation for the coming weeks, as I am the music librarian, and began mentally to review as I glanced at the small piles of scores that have been returned during my absence from choir what I shall have to do today in my weekly music library routine.
Before we left, the director had a piece of music that he had been arranging in the program he uses. He played the first part on the computer because it needed to be shared. It was indeed delightful but again I learned more about the music because of the energy he brought to it, the way he sang the tenor line, and the fact it couldn’t wait for today.
It seems that it is impossible properly to understand or interpret anything without loving it.
What is your relationship to interpretation? Do you think of it from the perspective of a musician, a linguist, or some other way? Are there assumptions that have needed to be abandoned for you?