Pure genius

We hear a lot about the two-speed economy.  I've seen plenty of it in my time -- the reality is that some have always had more than others, and are mightily reluctant to share the bounty.

It's interesting to see that some mining executives are trying to come up with ideas to ameliorate the distortion their industry brings to the national economy.  One of their headline responses is to tax owner-occupied homes.

Now, there can be no doubt that mining and anything to do with housing are the two most protected industries in this country right now.  There's not much that can be done about mining, unless the companies decide to ask a lower price for their product.

Housing, however, is a different matter.  Anyone with a tenancy can see how privileged speculation on the housing bubble has become.  If you have any communication with real estate agents it becomes uncomfortably clear: compared to a decade ago, they have become downright rude in their dealings with the routine business of tenancies.

The reality is that a couple of government policies have brought a major distortion into the housing market.  One of these is the first home owners grant, which was aimed at people buying newly-built housing stock, but the more serious problem really comes from negative gearing.  How many mum and dad investors are out there with a couple of investment properties -- undoubtedly bought at the expense of affordability for the kids?

There is a better way to address the tax gap on housing stock.  Let owner-occupied property continue under the present regime -- after all, having a roof over one's head is a fundamental right -- but get rid of negative gearing.  The price of housing is one of the major factors driving inflation, and the major fiscal policy response is for the Reserve Bank to raise the money rate.  They only have one effective tool to deal with inflation, but the market for housing remains febrile, particularly in the inner-city.

Of course, anyone with any stake in the current dynamics of the housing market will scream blue murder.  But it cannot be denied that the present structure of the market is warped.  If there is to be a bursting of the bubble, it would be better if it came through a staged process of redrawing the tax policy on negative gearing.  The point of the exercise should be to deflate the value of housing in order to support future affordability.

The problem is that the market has a habit of correcting itself, often with catastrophic results.

It may be that what could have been achieved by regulation may well happen by default.

In the meantime, we have mining executives brainstorming policy that leaves them well alone.

The toxic code

My response to the question of what team I follow has long been something along the lines of "can we change the subject, you're making me feel uncomfortable right now."  It's fair to say I'm more bemused than entertained by football.

I find the tribal aspect of the game tiresome, especially when it meets with marketing, clogged roads at the weekend and drunken parties in the neighborhood.  The whole celebrity razzamatazz surrounding the players makes me wonder how far things can sink in a country where our needs extend well beyond the lavishing of bread and circuses.

The AFL has had its share of problem players in recent years.  Ben Cousins's brushes with the law have exposed an extremely seedy side of the lifestyle some of the higher-paid players are willing to embrace.  These would be the same young men the AFL promotes as role models to teenagers.

The last few weeks have brought a chain of events which are becoming more and more bizarre, and which suggest that football will soon be the cultural equivalent of a radioactive leak.

At the centre of the affair is an unnamed young lady who came into possession of a series of compromising photographs of a few players.  It seems that she met them at a school football clinic, and a chain of events that will no doubt soon become public proceeded from there.  Her motivation in making the photographs public is difficult to understand -- at first it was retribution for things going amiss in a personal relationship, but now it's turned into a spiral that threatens to bring the house down on the St Kilda football club.

Strange to say, Peter Costello came out with one of the more sensible comments about this whole sordid affair:

Footballers are not chosen for their moral principles. They do not go into a national draft for budding philanthropists. They can run and catch and kick a ball. What are the clubs thinking when they send them to schools to give guidance on life skills?

Costello was treated to a risible and lame attempt at a slapdown by Tony Abbott Mark Arbib (the resemblance between the two is uncanny).  Why the federal sports minister felt he had to go into bat for the philanthropic activities of the highly paid sports types is a mystery beyond my comprehension, so let's just assume he was making sure nobody got antsy about their tax-deductible status.

Costello's point is a very good one, but he refrained from pointing out the obvious problem in the middle of the whole affair.  Andrew Fraser had a piece in yesterday's Age which spelt out the problem that has evaded everyone else so far: the teenager at the centre of the affair is, "to all intents and purposes, a child."  He continues:

Children are supposed to have certain protection in society because it is considered by Parliament they are incapable of making adult decisions. Be under no misapprehension, this person is a child, irrespective of her physical appearance. As a person under 18, she cannot vote, drink or drive a car, all supposedly pursuits requiring a degree of maturity.

Of course, saying something like this to a free-spirited sixteen- or seventeen-year-old is a risky undertaking, but it is true nevertheless.  The girl claims to have fallen pregnant to one of the players.  This is the nub of the whole chain of events, as Fraser carries on:

We have the fact that appears undisputed - that a number of footballers had sex with her. Although she appears to be at the age of consent, many would still regard her as a minor.
I am shocked at the vituperative nature of the attacks upon her, yet on the other hand the footballers concerned seek sympathy for being foolish enough to jump into bed with her. Give me a break! They met her at a school footy clinic. They had sex with a child, no ifs, no buts. They don't deserve our sympathy.

Finally, Andrew Demetriou, chief executive of the AFL, has come out in print today.   He claims that a few things have been overlooked, such as the AFL's sharing community concern about recent events, and their commitment (evidenced in expert-backed programs) to ensuring that the game's culture does not condone violence against women.  Whatever the AFL has offered by way of support to the girl's family has clearly not been accepted so far.

It's hard to argue with such Panglossian bromides.  After all, they're the stock-in-trade of those who simply want a quiet life while believing they are truly making a difference.  There is one flaw in Demetriou's application of this approach.  He refers to football as an industry, then as a profession, by way of explaining why some players make such a foul mess of things:

I believe modern AFL players are more educated and socially aware than ever before. But like any group in the community, including doctors, lawyers and tradespeople, some will occasionally make mistakes. It's how they as individuals and we as an industry respond to those mistakes that's important.

 The last time I looked, football was still fundamentally a game.  The imposition of the idea of it being an industry is an ingredient in the current imbroglio.

If the men concerned were in any of our major social institutions, such as the police, education system, or the churches, there would be an instant outcry at such shameful and unprofessional conduct.  Calls for their rapid trial and imprisonment would be overwhelming.  The child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church turned on the habit many bishops had of moving offenders from one parish to the next, all the while denying knowledge of any wrongdoing.  It was an abdication of leadership and trust for which the Church is now paying -- and rightly -- a terrible price in lost goodwill and prestige.  Regaining the trust of people is now the work of many generations.  In places where the Church has been a central pillar of national identity, take Ireland for example, this trust may never be regained.  People will remember this for centuries.  The energy we see in the traditional liturgy movement in the Catholic Church is partly motivated by attempting to create structures of trust by insisting on a high doctrine of priesthood.  But even this cannot fill the massive credibility gap left by the revelations of the last thirty years.

If we expect football players to be role models to young people, then perhaps it would do no harm if a some were to find themselves in prison very soon.  There is no other cultural response available to the AFL for creating structures of trust so long as it defines itself as an industry.  Many good works may come from the players, but the present affair emanates from a school football clinic.  Problems with women and homophobia have been a feature of the AFL for a long time.  This has been recognized through the creation of codes of conduct and liaison officers, but these cannot answer the fundamental issue of players being led to believe there will be no negative consequences for borderline or criminal behavior.  The AFL's response to the Ben Cousins affair was to allow him to be drafted to another team in a different state.  Shifting problem players around is an established part of the AFL culture.  When things go wrong, the defense is invariably a variation on the theme 'boys will be boys.'

This is the attitude of an institution with a toxic culture.  It does not deserve the trust and loyalty of the people who pay their annual dues.  One can only hope that the whole edifice comes tumbling down very soon.

Practicing hymns

In a church choir, hymns rank as bread-and-butter material.  I've sung in choirs where practicing hymns took up a sizeable portion of rehearsal time, and others where the choir didn't see the hymns until the service began.  There is good and bad in both of these ways of approaching hymns: it is easy to waste rehearsal time on the trivial aspects of singing hymn, but it's just lazy to regard practicing hymns as an unnecessary chore.

Congregations know when they are being led well, which is why it is important to rehearse anything the choir sings with them.  This is a vital part of a church choir's raison d'etre, and ought not to be neglected.

There are some specifically musical ends to be pursued by practicing hymns, and I'd like to share some of these here today.

In a choir where you have a few people who are at the start of their singing career, hymnody provides a sound basis for aural training.  This includes learning to sing scales, pitch intervals, rhythm, focusing on producing well-shaped vowels and articulating consonants consistently and crisply.  There are a few steps I have followed for a few years now which I find useful for practicing hymns.

It is good to start by singing the scale and tonic chord of a hymn.  This helps to anchor the tonality of the tune, as well as building a solid element of aural training unto the more directly performance-oriented part of a rehearsal.  To get things started, you can introduce this either by playing the home chord on the piano and having the choir sing the scale from that, or -- later down the track -- see if anyone can find the new tonic from the last note of the previous hymn tune.  Bear in mind that people need to be given a couple of opportunities to get the new tonality really secure: singing a scale or an arpeggiated chord only once is of limited use at the early stages.

Another aspect of tonality awareness you can use here is asking the choristers to identify the tonic note.  It's usually the final note of a tune (there are exceptions, I know -- Gonfalon Royal is the classic case).  This helps to reinforce recognition of the notes of the stave.  You might use this as a first step before playing the note/chord on the piano.

The second step is to see if anyone can pitch the first three or four notes of the hymn tune.  It'll be wobbly at the beginning, but things will improve as people develop their ears.  You could link this up with using solfa.  If you use handsigns, you've just incorporated an element of kinesthetic learning that should help to speed things along.  If you've already asked a chorister to identify DOH on the stave, you could use solfa to sing the notes of the tune before linking it up with the stave.  At the moment, I'm using solfa in this way quite a lot.  I wish I had known more about it when I started out as a choir director, as it would have saved me a lot of anxiety.

Rhythm is very important.  If it's sloppy, people will notice.  If it's well-articulated, people will appreciate it.  It's just got to be right.  I always insist on having my younger choristers clap the rhythm -- they love doing it, although they have to be constantly challenged to get it absolutely right.  I always try to make sure everybody gets to clap a tune on their own.

A further aspect of rhythm which is frequently neglected is the gap between the verses of a hymn.  If the pulse isn't maintained, then the singing won't be secure in the first lines of each verse.  Always try to make sure the pulse is constant: in duple-metre tunes, the break should be two whole beats; in triple-metre it should be three whole beats.  There has to be some flexibility in applying the rule where a tune starts with an anacrusis, but you will find that maintaining the pulse (and the order of strong-weak) will clarify how to do things.

Then there's vowels and consonants.  My practice is never to sing a hymn straight off in a rehearsal.  The last step before introducing the words -- we've already dealt with pitch and rhythm -- is to sing the tune, either in the performance tempo or close to it.  My choristers can usually pick the syllable: mah, pah, rah (with a rolled r), tah, boo, yeah, oo, ehr, uhse, zoo, zee, zah, and so on.  You can even challenge your choristers' consonant-producing faculties with delights such as singing a whole tune to words such as kite, tack, zap, zat, disc, dud, dave, tack, suds, slop, sludge.  In each case, the vowel must be pure, and the consonant must be short and crisp.  I apply a rule along the lines of 80/20: in any given word, 20% is consonant, 80% is vowel.

By the time you spend five minutes doing this sequence of things, your choristers should be eager (not to say relieved!) to finally get to sing the words.  They'll be lazy at first: no amount of practice syllables can make a chorister translate a concept without some prompting.  I often get choristers to sing in foreign accents to make sure they pick up the consonants properly.  German and hillbilly seem to be firm favourites at the moment.

The very last step is to put it all together.  This is the moment to insist on good phrasing of each line, and to concentrate on the one or two verse couplets that need to be sung as a single phrase.  One perfectly-sung hymn is a fine reward for rehearsal time properly spent.  The flow-on effects should permeate the rest of your rehearsal in the form of enhanced tonal awareness and gradually-improving sight singing.  And, of course, everything here can be applied equally well in learning other music.

A thought for Mr Gaddafi

Events in the world over the last few days have been quite tragic.  Apart from the loss of life, the architectural toll on the city of Christchurch in New Zealand is terrible to behold.

But it's the moving of tectonic plates in some of the world's oldest sites of civilization which prompt me to ponder aloud today.  It seems that Libya is to follow the script of Egypt, but at a far higher human cost.  The outcome can only be one thing: sadly, it is the privilege of dictators to take a long time to realize how limited their options truly are.  It seems that Mr Gaddafi is determined to leave scorched earth and a people undone by the traumas that have been taking place, and which will unfold over the coming days.  His supporters in the West have gone strangely quiet; do they realize the generational party is nearly over for them as well?  The world might finally be able to get over the Cold War, at long last.

The thing that strikes me as different about Libya, compared to Egypt and Tunisia, is the open use of mercenary troops to defend what must surely be described now as the acien regime.  This is necessary, if you consider the mutiny of several divisions of the armed forces, not to mention the resignations of a good portion of the diplomatic corps.  Some would say that hiring mercenaries when your own forces have ceased to follow orders is a sure sign that things ought to change, but we have the examples of so many governments collapsing in this way it seems pointless to dwell on the issue.

Machiavelli has an interesting take on the use of mercenaries, which popped into my mind:

I want to show you what unhappy results follow the use of mercenaries.  Mercenary commanders are either skilled in warfare or they are not: if they are, you cannot trust them, because they are anxious to advance their own greatness, either by coercing you, their employer, or by coercing others against your own wishes.  If, however, the commander is lacking in prowess, in the normal way he brings about your ruin.  If anyone argues that this is true of any other armed force, mercenary or not, I reply that armed forces must be under the control of either a prince or a republic: a prince should assume personal command and captain his troops himself; a republic must appoint its own citizens, and when a  commander so appointed turns out incompetent, should change him, and if he is competent, it should limit his authority by statute.  Experience has shown that only princes and armed republics achieve solid success, and that mercenaries bring nothing but loss; and a republic which has its own citizen army is far less likely to be subjugated by one of its own citizens than a republic whose forces are not its own.

The Prince, XII.

Spare a thought for the people of Christchurch and Canterbury Province, and those of Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, and Tunisia.

Music for Sunday 27 February

Readings for the week are linked from this page, and the psalm setting can be found here.  The congregational setting will be Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist (Together in Song, 756).  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Immortal, invisible, God only wise [143]
Sequence: Morning has broken [156]
Offertory: All creatures of our God and King [100]
Communion: Let all mortal flesh keep silence [497]

During the coming Lent season, the congregation will be taking up singing the Lord's Prayer again.  The setting will be a modern words with Merbecke.  The choir is to sing this setting during communion for the next couple of weeks.

J.S. Bach's Pastorella [BWV 590]

I've been accumulating little essays on various organ pieces for a long time, partly the result of writing program notes, partly out my reference instinct.  Some of this material has made it into Organ Australia over the last couple of years.  Since one of the objects of this blog is to share knowledge about organ music, here's something which I wrote recently about Bach's Pastorella [BWV 590].

If you would like to listen, there's a very fine recording by James Kibbie here.  You can either download the tracks, or let them open in your computer's media player.

If you would like to refer to a score, you'll find it here.
 
Many of us play pastoral-inspired pieces at different times of the year for a variety of reasons. The liturgically single-minded might schedule a pastoral piece for a Sunday where the readings dwell on the image of the Good Shepherd, or anything involving the newly-born, livestock or pets, such as Christmas Eve or St Francis’s day. I’m sure barely a Christmas goes by without someone playing the Pifa from Messiah for a crib service, or as a quiet interlude during a well-attended carols pageant.

The pieces which make up Bach’s Pastorella were probably not intended to be a unified set in the way we see it, mediated as our view is through a century-and-a-half of edition-making. Peter Williams highlights the difficulty of making too many sweeping claims about the aesthetic unity of this piece: ‘it is possible that the whole work was composed/compiled for some unknown occasion – but also that movements 2, 3, 4 have nothing to do with the first, to which alone the title “Pastorella” applies, whatever “ingenious synthesis” the whole work might be said to achieve...If it could ever be shown that in its present form BWV 590 is authentic, it would be a unique imitation, contrapuntally worked, of four Italian genres: pastorale, allemande, aria, giga.’  (Peter Williams, The Organ Music of J.S. Bach, 2nd ed., Cambridge: CUP, 2003, p 197.)

Each of the movements maintains a drone in some way, like a hurdy-gurdy or bagpipe played in the meadow. The first and second movements achieve this through pedal-points across several bars, the third by a very slow harmonic rhythm, and the fourth by constant return to a motivic centre on the accented beats.

The first movement should be played on one manual, and is the only one which uses the pedals. As ever, you would be well served to choose your registration carefully. The major point to bear in mind is that the stops you choose should speak well and have a good deal of colour to them. Although the edition linked here only gives a couple of ornaments, you should view this as a guide for further elaboration using similar figures in both hands. While this movement is nominally in F major, it ends rather surprisingly with a full close in A minor.

This trip into mediant harmony at the end of the first movement provides the springboard into the second movement, which is firmly in C major. This movement is clearly intended for performance on a single manual, but given that the two sections are repeated, there is scope to have contrasting registrations set up on different manuals. One needs to be careful of getting too sentimental about this movement: it is very sweet, but you should avoid getting too wet.

The third movement flips the mode, taking us into C minor. The pulsing chords in the accompanying line underpin the slow harmonic rhythm. This allows Bach to ‘walk around’ the key and explore its properties, which gives this movement a slightly improvisatory feeling. The melody is unmistakably Bachian. This movement could be played on a single manual, or with the top line as a solo. In this case, you might not want to follow the Novello edition’s rather passé suggestion of the Orchestral Oboe as the solo colour. Unless it’s particularly special, a reed really isn’t the right sound for this movement. You should explore to find the right solo colour on your instrument.

The final movement takes us back to the home key. This is a lively giga, although there is plenty of Bach’s fugal approach here. The piece is built around a semiquaver motif which circles around a tonal centre in each entry: C-G-C in the first section, C-F-C in the second. Use this concentration on tonal centres as part of your strategy for practising this piece: if you concentrate on anchoring your fingering pattern around the repeated notes, it should make preparing for performance a much more relaxed process. One of the compositional tricks I enjoy in this piece is that everything is turned upside-down in the second section: it feels a bit like crawling over the monkey bars. This movement calls for a bolder registration. You might consider some variation of 8, 4, 2, or a small principal chorus up to mixture. The main point is that this piece has to sparkle with charm, wit and humour.

Given the sunny mood of the Pastorella, it could serve well for a feast day, or during the long stretch of green Sundays after Pentecost. It is a firm feature of my wedding and funeral repertoire, where one sometimes needs a good deal of music to fill up the space before the service. It certainly makes waiting for brides or late-running relatives less of an endurance test. The four movements of this piece could be used as an extended service prelude, or broken up so that your congregation can enjoy it over a whole service. For the latter, I would suggest the following scheme for a Eucharistic service: the first and second movements for the prelude, the third for during communion, and the final movement as a sprightly postlude.

The Great American Paradox

With thanks to Truthdig.

Herbert Spencer on Music

Over the next few days, I'm expecting to finish an essay that's due for publication sometime later in the year.  One of the surprising turns the research has taken is that I'm now looking once again at Herbert Spencer.  For me, Spencer has been something of an interesting intellectual byway in the world of late-nineteenth century musicology, yet I am beginning to build him into the picture as my work proceeds in new directions.

Spencer was the father of modern social science, and his writings in this area and across a range of other subjects was prolific.  Like so many Victorians, it seems like he had a taste for anything he could lay his hands on.

One area where Spencer courted controversy was in his attempt to put forward a theory of the origins of music.  He accepted that music was a feature of human evolution, and argued that music proceeded from the muscular stimuli which produce impassioned speech.  This is known as the speech theory.

Spencer's clashes with various English musical writers, including Edmund Gurney and Ernest Newman, have been amply documented by John Offer and Peter Kivy, among others.  What interests me is how he applied his thinking to the place of music in general education.  In an essay on education, titled What Knowledge is of Most Worth?, Spencer divided the types of knowledge imparted through education into five areas.  These were: knowledge which has to do with self-preservation; knowledge which is necessary for living well (i.e: earning a living, using the resources of the earth to increase production); knowledge required to rear and discipline children; knowledge which supports the operation of the state; and knowledge which can be used for leisure pursuits.

Needless to say, music is classified into the latter group.  In discussing painting, sculpture, music, and poetry, Spencer asserts that they each tap into different areas of scientific knowledge (in the sense of the natural and observational sciences).  He argues that "not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music poetry, but...science is itself poetic."

Here's what Spencer says about music in this essay:

To say that music...has need of scientific aid will cause still more surprise.  Yet it may be shown that music is but an idealization of the natural language of emotion; and that consequently, music must be good or bad according as it conforms with the laws of this natural language.  The various inflections of voice which accompany feelings of different kinds and intensities, are the germs out of which music is developed.  It is demonstrable that these inflections and cadences are not accidental or arbitrary; but that they are determined by certain general principles of vital action; and that their expressiveness depends on this.  Whence it follows that musical phrases and the melodies built of them, can be effective only when they are in harmony with these general principles.  It is difficult here properly to illustrate this position.   But perhaps it will suffice to instance the swarms of worthless ballads that infest drawing-rooms, as compositions which science would forbid.  They sin against science by setting to music ideas that are not emotional enough to prompt musical expression; and they also sin against science by using musical phrases that have no natural relations to the ideas expressed: even where these are emotional.  They are bad because they are untrue.  And to say they are untrue, is to say they are unscientific.

"We do not for a moment believe that science will make an artist," says Spencer, although science may make artists and audiences better.

What intrigues me here is that Spencer is making a very big argument about the relationship of music and science.  Essentially, he is looking at music as science.  There can be no doubt that distortions are involved in Spencer's perspective.  For instance, I have yet to find any reference to the contemporary work of Helmholtz in acoustics and musical cognition, and Spencer seems not to have taken on board much of Gurney's argument about what constitutes musical perception.  Given that the big argument in introducing higher studies in music during the nineteenth century was that it constituted either a science or a literature, this is an interesting and odd gap.

Putting our Alleluias away

In a couple of weeks it will be Lent.  I've been spending some time getting things together for the upcoming season, given that I have a small group of young choristers who need to be encouraged to look inquisitively on the spectacle in which they are a part from week to week.

Let's face it, the Church can either be dreadfully obscure and boring, or an enchanting place where all things seem possible.  It is frequently obscure on the very things that matter most.  Children interact with the world by asking why things are the way they are.  They already see things through the imagination.  Sadly, many people who have spent a while around churches find it difficult to deal with this.

So, I've been putting my mind to how young choristers might be able to see Lent in a positive way without slipping into solecism and focusing solely on the haberdashery.  Here are a couple of principles.

Lent should be viewed as something other than a time when we give things up.  The most liberating thing I was ever told about Lent is that it is a time for taking things up -- doing things that we might make excuses to avoid at other times of the year.  For instance, using the daily office, following a study program, doing a personal spot of moral weeding and so on.  You might resolve to stop mumbling about the things you've been disliking since Christmas, and either to do something to address the problem, or to just force yourself into taking a broader perspective.  The point is to use the season to move ourselves into a different -- slightly or radically different, as it may be -- way of seeing the world.  Without that, we can't really expect to understand what Easter is all about.

All the same, Lent does have a particular liturgical expression.  One of the most notable changes is the disappearance of the Gloria and the Alleluia.  It's one change that children will notice straight off, because suddenly they have to pay attention to what happens at the end of the second hymn.  Now I think about it, it's not only children who have that problem...

So the major point in helping choristers to appreciate the wonders of Lent is in drawing their attention to the way the time is used.  One side is the positive -- deliberately tackling something enriching.  Some tailored activities for during the sermon are in preparation on that front.

The other point to highlight is the missing elements of the service.  Lent can be a very dry, bleak season for many people.  Paradoxically, some of the richest music has been composed for Lent and Passiontide.  Now, we can't expect choruses from the St Matthew Passion (not this year!), but there are other ways of seeing the removal of joyful elements from the service in a different light.  We put these things away in order to refresh our sense of what joy is.

In the next couple of weeks, I'm going to distribute papers with the word ALLELUIA emblazoned in big letters.  Choristers, children, adults -- anyone who wants to -- will be invited to decorate their paper as elaborately as they can.  After mass on 6 March, the papers will be placed in a box.  They will remain there until Easter day, when we will bring them back out again.

More posturing

In the dying days of Lyn Kosky's reign as the state minister for transport, I wrote a letter to The Age suggesting that flat fares would be a more sensible way of managing the new Myki smartcard.  At the time it was being phased in on trains, ostensibly so that the state government could say what eager little munchkins they were, keeping a major promise on public transport policy.

I'm pleased to say that the letter was published, with relatively little alteration other than fixing a dreadful grammatical howler I'd let through.

Now we're a bit more than twelve months on, and there's been talk of getting rid of, then keeping, Myki.  It's natural for the new state government to want to review the process, given poor budget management and the apparent lack of really responsible oversight of the whole project.  Myki is now operating on trams and buses, which means it is well-entrenched.

I recently started using my smartcard as the primary ticket for public transport.  It came in the mail while they were being issued free of charge, and has been sitting on my desk for a while now.  Given that my preferred mode of transport to and through the city is the bicycle, I tend not to catch trains and trams more than once or twice in an ordinary week.  All the same, I'm pleased that the system works well -- it's certainly no slower than the old Metcard system.

There are still a couple of things that annoy me.

EFTPOS transactions on Myki machines still take a small geological age to go through.  I've seen people visibly age a year or two waiting for EFTPOS transactions to clear on the old Metcard machines, and then a further year or two for the ticket to come out.  I've never understood why it should take so long, given that ordinary retail transactions by this medium are done in under 10 seconds.  I would really like to see things improved so that moving money from one card to another is not appreciably slower than feeding the machine with coins.  I know I could do this on the internet, but I choose to do it at the train station.

Swiping on and off on trams and buses is really impractical.  I know we sort of have a culture of doing this from the habit of always validating the Metcard, although this only has to be done once per change of vehicle.  Swiping on and off will grow up via incessant reminders, but this seems counterproductive with a smartcard ticketing system.  It makes sense where there is a clear barrier to entering the carriage -- such as train stations -- to calculate point-to-point fares.  It's not so sensible to do so with transport media where there is no clear barrier to exiting the vehicle.  Using an Oyster Card in London is great because you jump on the bus, swipe your card and pay £1.50.  It's easy, and you know you've done what the transport authority expects you to do by paying your fare.

Swiping your card on entry and exit is ostensibly justified on the grounds that passenger movements can be monitored in the everlasting pursuit of improved services.  I'm still at a loss to understand why one swipe isn't enough to achieve this, but perhaps I'm displaying my underlying unease about people having their movements monitored in this sort of detail.  There is an incentive to swipe off in order to avoid being charged the maximum fare.  This is a modification to existing passenger habits, where validating a Metcard happens once.  Flat fares -- say $1.50-$2.50 -- would be a far superior solution, and would encourage better use of Myki.

The new state government would be well served to consider flat fares for trams and buses before making any other moves around the ticketing system.

Music for Sunday 20 February

This week we begin our slide into Lent.  In the old calendar, this week was Septuagesima Sunday.  One of the reasons I maintain the titles of these Sundays is that it signals the change of season.  It's useful to have a gentle preparation for whatever discipline one might take on for Lent.  It's easier to maintain a program of study or devotional activity if you make a soft start.  Likewise, if you're giving something up, it is better to taper it down for three weeks before you have to go cold turkey.

Of course, we don't observe the old rules about retiring the Alleluia three weeks before Lent.  Instead, I've scheduled a series of Alleluia-ridden communion hymns through these three weeks before Ash Wednesday in order to get it out of the system.  I'm toying with having a little activity for putting away the Alleluia with the choristers after Mass on 6 March.

But back to this week.  The readings are linked here, and the psalm setting is here.  The setting will be Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist (Together in Song, 756).  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: A new commandment [sung twice -- 699]
Sequence: Father of heaven, whose love profound [131]
Offertory: Christ is made the sure foundation [432]
Communion: Hallelujah, sing to Jesus [517]

More breathing

Having nursed wombats for a week or two, it would be about time to add a new exercise so that the choristers don't get caught in a rut.

This time, the aim is to reinforce the connections between deep breathing, good voice placement, and developing the higher registers.

Because I am a tenor, kids find it challenging to model their sound on mine.  Tenors have some of the technical qualities necessary for producing a good soprano sound -- especially making use of the head registers -- but on the whole, it's a vocal production which relies on a lot of counter-intuitive methods.  That's why good tenors are rare, and natural ones a matter of history in the making.

The upshot of this is that I find it challenging to teach young choristers how to access their head registers.  This is a problem which is reinforced by the wider aural environment; most of the women in pop music sing deep in their chest voice, and the result is that most people imitate that husky quality even when singing in places where it is difficult to maintain.  Another problem here is that pop songs tend to have fairly chopped up phrases -- even a long phrase in the score ends up being subdivided.  Part of this is an aesthetic conceit, but I suspect there is a lot of shallow breathing involved as well.

I find the following exercise useful for starting to connect the gesture of inhalation with supporting higher pitches.

Imagine you're blowing up a balloon: notice how the lower abdominal muscles relax to let the air deep into the chest.  To blow up a balloon really well, you need to blow from the bottom of your lungs.  (You could bring balloons in for the rehearsal to demonstrate this -- just be prepared for a bit of rioting and excitement.)

Having established how it feels to breath to the bottom of the chest, there are two things to do.  First, use a hiss, telling the choristers to imagine that they're blowing bubbles up into the air (while maintaining good posture, of course).

Then, sing either single pitches or a simple melody (e.g: Hot cross buns).  Make sure you start from the upper-middle register (for children, this would be around A-Bb; use these as the upper notes for HCB).  Using the deep breath, tell the choristers to keep imagining that they're blowing bubbles through the top of their nose, or bouncing oranges off their forehead.  It will take a couple of goes in the starting key to bring this all together.

Then you modulate -- do it for no more than four half-steps to begin with.  Watch for bored expressions, because this is a sure sign it was time to move on about three minutes ago.  Only carry on if you're going to up the challenge to keep the singers involved.

This is an exercise I keep in the mix for building tone.  It works equally well with adults as with children; if you use well-known nursery rhymes, you can add interval recognition and solfa signs into the exercise.

More proof you'd be better off with an interesting book

Why is an opinion poll newsworthy?

We know that opinion polls have a fairly generous margin for error, and that rogue results come around all the time.  Without knowing the full methodology -- choice and phrasing of questions, demographic profile of those polled etc -- it is difficult to understand the use and purpose of the polls.  Taken at this stage of a parliamentary term, where the House of Representatives is pretty stable, something like this looks like mischief.

These things only matter if policy is truly made in the press office, or by hacks in the back room whose job is all about 'winning' a day's media cycle.

The media has become "lamestream" by virtue of putting itself up as a player in the political process.  Granted, we don't accept the authority of the commentator quite so readily as 30 years ago.  But one gets the niggling feeling that making news out of opinion polls is more about staying in the game than really trying to make any sense of it.

Sitting down for coffee this morning, I saw today's headlines and opened my book instead.  My coffee tasted better as a result.

Breathing drill

Here's a good breathing drill for the end of a vigorous choir warmup.  The aim is to cultivate good support by continuing the gesture of inhalation into the production of consonant or vowel tone.  It makes a good transition to singing music where you want well-shaped phrases; I tend to use it before practising hymns at the moment.

This is a count-on count-off exercise where the time for breathing in is the same as for breathing out.  You can put a sequence of numbers up on a board so that there is an implicit element of challenge.

Tell the choristers that they are nursing a baby wombat.  Their hands should be joined, making a relaxed arc with the arms.  They should aim to breathe towards the bottom of the arc.

From the moment the leader starts to count the choristers are to slowly inhale.  While they do this, the wombat will grow slightly, gently pushing their arms out and up from the body.  If it looks like they're pulling their arms up before the count off, it's not being done right.  They have to feel like the movement is involuntary and continuous.  As they release the breath -- using a hiss, or a rolled R, or holding a pitch -- the wombat continues to grow until it becomes quite large, filling the maximum space of the arms being held in an arc.

To put it more practically, here's a quick sketch of how I present it in a rehearsal:

OK guys, wombats.  Standing nice and tall, beautiful and relaxed.  Close your eyes, cradle your wombat, and we're going to count to five, first breathing in, then again on a steady hiss.  Remember how your wombat is going to keep growing all the way to the end of the second count of five.


ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE...HISS


ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE...
...AND OFF!


That was very good -- who thinks they could go to six?

...and so on.

Make sure you change the sound they have to make each time -- and be sure not to start with the same sound every time you use it.

Asking a question

Is there anyone out there who could tell me how to acquire a Curwen Modulator?

I used one briefly last year, and came away amazed at the results.  I've knocked up a very basic imitation to work with for now.  It's done splendid service for teaching hymn tunes at lightening speed over the last fortnight.  One of my adult choristers recognized the concept and said it was good.  He then said he used to have one of the real charts, but didn't keep it.

With the start of term I'm starting to apply a lot of things that have come out of my self-appraisal over the summer.  Having had twelve months standing in front of a room full of young choristers, not to mention gaining mastery of the basics of teaching from a Kodaly perspective, there was a lot to sift through and think about.  Hence some of the blog silence over the last few weeks.

One thing I am aiming to do this year is integrate solfa with teaching the stave.  Young folk sometimes find it very difficult to assimilate the idea of pitch going up and down.  A modulator helps to make the visual links a bit clearer, and then (and only then) should it be translated onto the stave.  Using it with handsigns introduces a kinesthetic element.

A year ago I would have said this is a very cumbersome way of going about teaching music literacy, but it has a couple of advantages.  Most notably, it helps to define the tonal space -- it's much easier to teach intervals using solfa.  The relationships between pitches are clearer.  If you keep teaching the stave in parallel with working on solfa the leap isn't so difficult to make.  So long as you avoid using solfa as a method of rote learning it can be very beneficial for teaching the stave if you start by asking the choristers to begin by identifying DOH.

Another thing I'm going to aim for is to relax about teaching rhythm.  Perhaps it's a reflection of my own earlier weakness in this area that I have always taught it up front, which means it becomes the primary way of approaching new material.  Getting the rhythm right is vital, but not if it crowds out learning the rest of the score (i.e: pitch...).

And now a resolution for the small band of readers out there.  I'm going to try to put some more choir training activities up here this year.  It probably won't surprise you to know that these are the pages that get the most hits on this blog.  Who knows, it may increase my traffic...

Music for Sunday 13 February

Well, week one of the second year of the parish youth choir went well enough.  Everyone has come back refreshed and ready for another year of work.  The adults who worked through the summer made a good sound as well.  It's been good to have the opportunity to do some intensive work with the older singers over the summer, and the results do show.

Readings for the week are linked here, and the psalm setting we're using will be found here.  The Chabanel Project also include practice tracks of some of their settings, and you can hear the one for this week here.  Naturally, a performance by Australian Anglicans will be somewhat different from the efforts of earnest American Catholics...

The mass setting will be Philip Mathias (Together in Song, 757), the last time this setting will be used in full until Easter.  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Christ is the world's true light [238, tune 106]
Sequence: God has spoken by his prophets [158]
Offertory: Christ is the world's light, he and none other [246]
Communion: Take my light, and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee [599 ii]

There are a few things in the wind for choral developments at All Saints.  I'm hoping the youth choir will get to the stage of being able to sight read effectively (if slowly) by around the end of the Easter season.  To aid this, we're going to work on expanding our repertoire of anthems, and start adding service music.  Over the first three rehearsals for the year we're working on revisiting the material we worked on last year, and starting to push the boat out by working more instensively on solfa and stave reading.  After that, the aim is to produce a communion anthem every two to three weeks.

As they used to say in the days of the wireless: stay tuned.

Two years ago

Two years ago I played for a wedding.  It was an unusual day, being in the high 40s and very windy until late in the afternoon.  The temperature was already well into the 30s when I left the house; arriving at the church was like stepping into the freezer display at Myers.

About twenty minutes before the service someone decided it would be better to open all the doors to ventilate the church.  Conditions in the organ gallery went from tolerable to disgusting in under ten minutes.  Even with fans going at full blast, the hot air being circulated in the building quickly won.

Halfway through the second hymn I noticed that the keys had become a bit slippery.  A dustcloth quickly revealed a lot of grit.  By the end of the postlude I had blackened fingertips.

The grit on the keyboard was ash blown in from the bushfires at the edge of the city.

Going home after the service was a surreal trip.  The sky was a filthy yellow, and the smell of burning eucalypt permeated everything.  The car nearly died twice; the shade hadn't lasted, so there was a lot of intense heat in the motor.  The roads were very quiet -- actually, the city as a whole seemed very subdued.

When the cool change came through at 5.00pm, the temperature dropped about 20 degrees in under ten minutes.  When these things happen, I normally open up the house; with all the mess from the fires in the air this was out of the question.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I grew up in a country town where our awareness of bushfire was embedded from primary school on.  We were taught the stop-drop-roll drill in grade prep.  Excursions to the local CFA depot were an annual fixture.  Even the cub-scouts had a special series of activities focusing on fire prevention, and dealing with getting caught in an emergency.

Oh, and we didn't have "fire events" like we do now.  Rather, we had blazes, massive fires and bloody disasters.  And you didn't want to get caught up in any of them.  A "fire event" sounds a bit too tidy and sanitized for what a bushfire really is.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two years on, and the various places where the fires struck on Black Saturday show signs of regeneration.  Marysville is being rebuilt.  Trees are showing signs of regrowth.  Roads and services have been restored, and houses destroyed by the fires are gradually being replaced.  People are emerging from the trauma, but restoring the emotional fabric does take longer than fixing the physical surroundings.

The body politic has done its healing, too.  The Royal Commission analyzed the events of the day, with its report buried in the same way previous reports have been disposed of.  The Labour government of John Brumby is gone.  But the thread of the Royal Commission report runs through as a point of continuity.  Aspects of the findings have found their way into policy as a kind of talisman -- there more for talk than action.  This is also why we now have 'scientific' cattle grazing in the Alpine National Park.

I'll stop before this turns the ugly corner into rant territory...

Music for Sunday 6 February

Well, the term break is officially over, as of today.  I'm taking the new music list off to the printers this morning, and then the first choir rehearsal for the year will eat up the late afternoon and early evening.

It's always fun doing the music list for the early part of the year.  I always make a point of including the alternative titles for various Sundays -- thus, the fourth Sunday in Lent carries the subtitle 'laetare,' for example.  These things help to make us more aware of the underlying rhythm of the liturgy, something which it is hard to convey to young people whose experience is conditioned by almost anything other than stability.  Calling a Sunday by a Latin name also helps to remind us that we worship in communion with those who have gone before, and that the liturgy itself isn't necessarily ours to shape as we will.  And, of course, there's a certain amount of fun in seeing the frisson that goes through unwitting choristers when they stumble on the 'gesima' Sundays ("...it says sexagesima!").  I'll see if I remember to post photos of various choral eyebrows ascending...

Readings for this week are linked here, and the psalm setting is here.  The setting will be Philip Mathias (Together in Song, 757).  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: God of freedom, God of justice [657, tune 497]
Sequence: O day of God, draw near [616, tune 490]
Offertory: O changeless Christ, for ever new [254]
Communion: Praise and thanksgiving, Father, we offer [627]