Category Archives: music

Noise, distraction, and caffeine?

Posted on Feb 17, 2009 | 5 comments

Yesterday this appeared on Twitter. It was posted by a freelance editor and writer who works from home:

Dying JUST DYING to know why writers go to coffee shops to write! Isn’t it noisy & distracting? I really wanna know what the appeal is!

If you’ve read my earlier post Shhhhhh… you’ll know I’m quite sensitive to noise when I’m trying to work. In fact, I think real, total silence can be a wonderful thing…

… or it would be, if it existed. In fact the search for silence is elusive. The avant-garde composer John Cage discovered this when he visited a completely soundproofed room, and could still hear two sounds. He asked why; he was told that one came from his nervous system, and the other from the blood circulation through his ears.

So I think the issue isn’t so much about silence versus noise, as about distracting versus non-distracting sounds. Maybe being a musician makes me more sensitive to sound. I’m not sure. Anyway Sherrie’s Twitter question set me thinking about what the differences might be.

Demands, reactions and associations

What makes sounds distracting, then? I think several kinds of noise make it particularly difficult to work (or, for that matter, to go to sleep, or whatever else you’re doing which requires you to ignore them):

Sounds which make demands

If your phone or doorbell rings, it demands to be answered (regardless of whether you decide its demand is justified). If you cat miaows at you maybe it’s demanding to be fed. If you’re living with somebody frail whose sense of balance is dodgy and you hear an unexpected heavy thud from upstairs, the sound demands you go and check whether they’re OK.

Sounds you automatically react to

By coincidence, many announcement systems in public places use a sound almost exactly like that of our doorbell to signal an announcement. Even though I’m not at home and it can’t possibly be the doorbell, my reflex reaction is to wonder immediately who’s at the door and why. Typically this almost completely breaks my attention on what I was doing. Occasionally, a mobile phone with a ringtone identical to mine will ring: I find myself checking my phone even though I’m certain that it’s set to vibrate and can’t possibly be ringing. Instinct is immediate; thought takes time.

For me, muffled speech works similarly–for example a television in the next room, with the volume low enough for me not to hear the actual words, but high enough for me to hear the bursts of speech. My brain automatically hears that there’s speech going on and tries to listen, even though there’s no hope of making it out.

Sounds with unhelpful emotions attached

This might be the voice of someone you really can’t stand, or the sound of their footsteps going past as you hope they won’t come and talk to you… or the sound of your neighbours squabbling, heard through the wall.

Sounds with strong associations

I play the violin rather a lot. As a result, I find it next to impossible to concentrate if there’s violin music going on in the background. Inevitably I find myself listening to the playing style, imagining the technique of playing it, noticing whether it’s in tune or not, thinking that if I were the player I’d prefer to do different phrasing, wondering how difficult it is to play and how easy the music is to get hold of, listening to hear what bowings and maybe even fingerings the player is doing, trying to identify the composer, remembering the time when I was in an orchestra accompanying that particular concerto… “Background music” is an impossibility if it’s violin music. Music on an instrument which I’ve never attempted to play–maybe that would work. But violin music is a disaster for doing anything else to.

However, there’s another kind of distraction, which I find quite a fascinating one.

Sound and mental channels

Try this simple-sounding exercise. write d en;goenovneojco ddo… Sorry, that should have said: try to speak and write simultaneously. This is something which most of us probably think we have no trouble doing when, for example, we’re writing notes while speaking to someone on the phone. But if you watch someone doing it, you’ll see that actually, they alternate between speaking and writing. You won’t see the pen writing on the page, or the fingers typing on the keyboard, at the same time as the lips are speaking words. It seems that the brain has one channel for creating words, and that if one activity is using it, another one can’t. The gibberish sentence above was the result of me trying to type “Write some words down” at the same time as saying “Speak a sentence”. “Write” came out OK, after three tries, but only because I told my fingers beforehand what the first few letters were which they had to type. And even then, it didn’t come out as “write” until the third attempt.

I think something similar happens with noise. It’s most obvious with speech, of course: if I’m writing words, then hearing other words is typically very distracting. And sometimes I’ve missed chunks of a speech programme on the radio by texting someone to tell them that it’s on: while the language part of my brain is processing the words to go in the text message, it’s not processing the words from the radio. But generally if I send someone a text about some music I’m hearing, that doesn’t make me miss any of the music. But obviously if I’m looking through a violin part to think how to play it, then background music can be extremely unhelpful. (Playing in an orchestra does eventually give one the ability to shut irrelevant music out in that situation, though–for example you can be mentally trying out your difficult passage while another section of the orchestra is rehearsing something else.)

Music, though, is related to language in some ways, and some researchers now believe we probably evolved music as a species before we evolved words. For example it’s thought that the way music communicates emotion is similar to the way tone of voice does, and a startling experiment some years ago demonstrated that people from different countries actually heard musical pitches differently.

Is there such a thing as “background music”? For some people there is, and some swear that they can’t work without music. For others, music is an impossibly compelling distraction which makes work impossible.

For me, the situation tends to be somewhere in between. I remember a particular occasion at university when I was studying (yes, I occasionally did!), and thought it would be helpful and enjoyable to have some music on at the same time. I put on one of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos. Could I work with it on? Not at all! And yet, I sometimes studied quite happily with music on in the background.

What I now know is that different kinds of music are different for me in this respect. I think it’s to do with the way the music is structured, and how similar it is to language. Baroque music, Bach in particular, is next to impossible to work to. It virtually breaks down in to sentences and words and letters. Music from the classical period is rather easier to work to. The nineteenth-century Romantic composers are much easier; with twentieth-century composers it depends on the style; probably the least distracting is the kind of atonal piece which has no discernible rhythm and consists of shifting tone-colours, long crescendos and the like. I think that’s because it’s the kind of music which is least like language, so it’s not using the same channels.

Non-distracting noise

What, then, is non-distracting noise? And why do people go to coffee shops?

I think there are three main aspects to it:

Sounds with relaxed or studious associations

These probably vary from person to person. As I type this, I can hear the comfortingly pleasant whirring of my laptop’s hard drive. For those of us who like working in a quiet place, I think that paradoxically the sounds can be part of what makes it feel quiet; being able to hear the birds outside, for example (as long as they’re behaving themselves, singing nicely and not squawking away).

Sound which shuts out other sounds

A good example of this is the tradition of playing quiet organ music before a church service: it helps people not to notice the distracting noises of people coming in, shifting in their seats, and doing all the things people do before a service.

Less obviously, but importantly:

Sound which doesn’t let you listen to it

I think this is where the coffee shop comes in. If enough people are having conversations around you, it’s hard to accidentally start listening to one of the conversations. You only catch the occasional word, and there’s nothing to latch on to. The situation’s over-complex for the ear, so it’s easier to give up trying to follow anyone’s conversation and just enjoy the pleasant atmosphere while getting on with whatever you’re trying to do.

So maybe that’s why people work in coffee shops. The emotional and attention-demanding noises are left at home, and the congenial, non-distracting noise envelops you so you can work.

That’s my theory, anyway.

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Creative cycles

Posted on Feb 9, 2009 | 1 comment

If you read this regularly, or read back a few pages, you’ll know that I’ve recently come back to blogging here after quite a long break, and that there’s been a mini-flurry of posts. You can read them below!

Resolutions

A while ago, an online artist friend wrote in her blog that she’d decided to try to draw something every day, to practise her art skills. I was immediately attracted to the idea of trying to write something every day, maybe for this blog, as a similar useful discipline. But then I hadn’t the energy for it and the idea foundered.

Then I re-read her post the other week, and was encouraged to have a go. My flurry of posts ensued.
I believe in encouraging the encourager, so I mentioned to her that she’d encouraged me to start writing again. Her reply was along the lines: “Well actually… Yes, I really ought to get back to doing that.. I’m not doing it at the moment”.

Another online friend, a clarinettist, had had good intentions of practising every day. She wrote in her blog about feeling discouraged at not managing to do it. (She also wrote very encouragingly about being encouraged by me! Thank you.) And as you know if you’ve read below, my violin practice lapsed over Christmas…

How many of your New Year resolutions took the form “I will [insert idealistic ambition of personal perfection] every day”? Did they succeed?

I very much doubt that they did, but I’m not sure this is a bad thing. Reflecting on my own situatiion and the experiences of my fellow bloggers, I found myself thinking about the idea of creative cycles.

Learning, rest and cycles

I think any creative activity is in fact a learning process. Musical performance is included in this, by the way, because you have to create your particular style of playing. You’re always trying to develop and move forwards…

But learning is hard work for the brain. It doesn’t like concentrating hard on one thing indefinitely; after working at something new, it likes time to assimilate what has been learnt. If you play an instrument, imagine this scenario: one day, you go to a long rehearsal, or you do some intense practice at home. You work hard at it. When you stop, you’re definitely ready for a rest… Next day, when you practise some more, you don’t want to work on the same piece again, so you practise something else. Or you do try to play the same music, but seem to be having an “off day”. Or, more likely than not, you have a day off from playing, but the music you were practising is still going through your head. You find yourself unconsciously whistling tunes from it as you do other things. A few days later, you play the music again. You find it has improved a lot–while you weren’t working on it. Your practice told your brain what was required to play. Afterwards–most likely while you were asleep, if the suggestions of recent research are right–your brain set about “reprogramming” itself to achieve what you’d fed into it.

It does seem that most of the improvement happens between practice periods, not during them. That’s one reason why it’s a bad idea to force yourself to practise the same thing for hours on end, expecting it to become perfect as you practise. When your brain says you need to stop, you need to stop.

I think something similar might apply over longer timescales. Maybe we shouldn’t expect to keep our self-promise to do a particular activity every day–or even every week. Maybe it’s not even desirable that we should. (Or maybe our needs in this respect vary from person to person.) Each activity needs rest periods. A particularly long, intense period of one activity might need to be followed by a particularly long and complete rest from it. This might actually be healthy and not a failure on our part at all; it might be the success of recognising the way of working that enables us to give the best results.

Solo musicians whom I’ve met generally say that they like to learn the notes for a piece, then put it aside for several months before coming back to it. Then they’re ready to work on getting it ready for public performance. Slogging away for ever isn’t necessarily the best approach. In fact I’m pretty sure that for any creative activity it’s entirely the wrong one. (On a smaller timescale: I wrote the bulk of this post a week or so ago. Then I left it, and now that I’ve come back to edit it, the process feels a lot easier than it did then.)

I’m interested in a lot of different things–that’s probably obvious from my blog posts. But with most of them I’m never happy unless I involve myself in them in some depth. I’ll buy a textbook on a subject and study it. I’ll try to find out what the “professional” approach to it is. I’m interested in music, mathematics, computer programming, writing, and so on. Well, I can’t do all of those at once in the sort of depth I want to. Typically I’ll immerse myself in one of them for several months. Then I come to a natural point where it feels like time to do something else. I take a break from the activity I’ve immersed in, and immerse myself in the next one. So each activity happens in cycles, interspersed with the others.

The most important activities never quite go away, though. For example, there’s no time in the last twenty years when I’ve not been playing regularly in at least one orchestra. But there have been times when I was working hard at improving my violin technique, and others when I simply did what was required to prepare for the next concert. Those times haven’t been ones of musical inactivity, though: I’ve had the sense of using and consolidating the technique that was previously worked on. A period of learning followed by a period of consolidation.

So that’s how it seems to work for me. If you’re involved in any creative activity, do you have a similar experience of it going in cycles? I’d love to hear from you.

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Enjoyable concert: full rehearsal and concert day

Posted on Sep 1, 2008 | Leave a comment

I wrote the previous post after the first rehearsal. We had a second rehearsal on Friday night (with the choir and the full orchestra: Wednesday was just strings), and then a final rehearsal on Saturday afternoon, with the concert in the evening.

Friday rehearsal

The main thing that became apparent at the Friday rehearsal was that the orchestra seating was going to be very cramped. This is quite uncomfortable for a string player. The reason is probably quite obvious: you need to be able to move the bow freely without either jabbing somebody with the sharp end, poking them in the ribs with the blunt end, knocking anyone’s music over, or damaging the bow by hitting an immovable object such as a stone pillar with it. And you want to be able to sit at an angle which allows you to see the conductor, the leader and your music, and which also allows your “desk partner”–the person you share a music stand with–to do the same. And THEN you want to accomplish all this without getting a stiff back from sitting awkwardly.

Everything seemed fine until the cellos said they hadn’t got room to play. Obviously something had to be done about this, so we all moved a bit thereby sharing the discomfort out. Now we were all short of about an inch of space compared to what we needed, rather than the cellos each having a foot less than they needed. We shuffled around into carefully crafted positions which just about made playing possible. I remarked that an inch of movement in any direction would prevent me playing. Everyone else seemed to be in a similar situation. All the chairs were in exactly the right position and woe betide anyone who moved them…

Then the alarming announcement: during the first half of the concert, it would be necessary to completely dismantle the string section after the first piece, to make room for a piano. Then, after the piano had been finished with and trundled off again, we would have to restore the seating and play our string piece. Things like this add considerably to the stress of a concert! So I was rather apprehensive about how it would work out. (I once had the experience of playing the whole of Suk’s Serenade for Strings without being able to see the conductor at all, at a concert in which the wind players performed a piece on their own directly before ours, and moved all our seats around in the process.)

Dress rehearsal

The Saturday afternoon rehearsal was good. The choirs sang well, their improvement from the day before was quite noticeable, and they seemed likely to improve even more by the evening. The orchestra’s playing was good too. But the leader–remember I was sitting with her, at the front–had got a bad cold and a cough which was threatening to become uncontrollable. And she had lots of solo passages to play. So it was quite worrying that she had to leave the rehearsal several times in search of drinks, cough medicines and so on. What if the cough got out of control in the concert and stopped her playing at a crucial moment? Who would play the solos? Very possibly me, but whereas she’d spent time at home practising them to make them sound wonderful, I’d be sightreading them, during the concert…!

I’m sure people in audiences just go along and listen to the music, unaware that all this stuff is going on!

Concert

In the event it worked out fine. Katy was full enough of cough medicine and heaven-knows-what to be able to play without disruption, and somehow managed to be full of medication without her brain clouding over; the solos were absolutely beautiful, and our performance of the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis seemed to take off–and miraculously, we did in fact manage to get our seats close enough to the original arrangement for us to be able to play it. And it was interesting hearing the original Thomas Tallis hymn–the one used by Vaughan Williams as the basis of the Fantasia–sung by a small choir at the back of the church before we played the actual piece.

It was quite a varied concert: music for big choir and full orchestra, for strings alone (the Fantasia), for choir and organ, for small unaccompanied choir (the Tallis hymn), and for solo singer and piano. (The solo singers were the baritone and soprano who would be singing in the second half for Fauré’s Requiem.)

So I enjoyed the concert, but was also very relieved when the first half was over, with all its potential sources of unwanted excitement. And judging by their response, the audience did too. The prolonged silence after the end of the Requiem before the applause started was a good sign; if the piece is performed well the audience like to enjoy the closing silence for a while before clapping. That’s very unnerving for the performers: it feels as though actually, they may never start clapping. But the enthusiastic applause then started, and we knew it had gone well.

And then off home, exhausted.

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Enjoyable concert: string rehearsal

Posted on Aug 28, 2008 | Leave a comment

Last night I went to the first rehearsal for a concert I’m playing in on Saturday. This is another nice event: it’s a mainly-choral concert which happens once a year. There is a small orchestra consisting of invited players, and a very good choir which I think consists of invited singers. (Well I’m assuming they’ll be good; last night was a strings-only rehearsal, but this will be the third year I’ve played and they were excellent the first two times.)

The music (for us) is

  • Vaughan Williams, Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis
  • Fauré, Requiem
  • Vaughan Williams, Towards the Unknown Region

though probably not in that order.

I’m not sure how well-known Vaughan Williams is outside the UK, so perhaps I should say a little about the Fantasia (and then give you a Wikipedia link or similar when I’ve looked it up). In this country it’s regarded as the string piece of all time, really (unless that place belongs to Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro). It was originally written to be performed in, I think, Gloucester Cathedral and it is written for string orchestra, a second, smaller string orchestra of about 8 players (seated well away from the main one), and string quartet. Just strings. In the original performance the string quartet was again seated separately, but we’re playing it the usual way: the leaders of the string sections stay in their normal seats and play solo for the quartet bits. We’re not playing it in a cathedral but we are playing it in a large parish church which isn’t much different from a cathedral and has just the right acoustics.

It’s a lyrical and very English piece, which uses everything from the sound of a quartet on its own to the lushly orchestrated sound of the whole string orchestra playing as loud as they can… Actually, around 18 months ago I had the opportunity to play it at an orchestral study day (just for strings) where we had an orchestra of about 60 string players; now that was quite something.) The second orchestra typically feature as an ethereal sound in the far distance, which continues after a climax from the full orchestra or which precedes a dramatic entry by everyone. The piece is based on a hymn setting by the Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, and a small choir will sing the original from the back of the church before we then play the Fantasia.

For this concert I’m sitting at the front of the first violins, next to the leader. I hadn’t known this or maybe I’d have looked at the music a bit more, because it means that I have to lead the orchestra in the sections where she’s playing solo as part of the string quartet. But I’ve played the piece before, so that’s OK. Anyway I digress. Her comment about playing the Fantasia after a summer of non-playing was “It’s like a nice hot bath”–which it is, really.

Towards the Unknown Region was a new piece to me. As I feared from the title, it did, towards the end, ascend speedily to heights on the violin which are unknown to many players… I ought to have a look a that section before Saturday. There’s about half a page of it.

And yes, the Fauré is the same piece as in the conducting course (see Opening the Envelope and How the conducting course went), but in a different version: this one has a full violin section. But it’s still a viola extravaganza really; we only play for a few of the movements, and then when we do play we often feel as though we should try to sound like violas. 😉

There’s another rehearsal tomorrow, then the concert is on Saturday. I wasn’t really in the mood for rehearsals and concerts yet, but this should be good. 🙂

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How the conducting course went

Posted on Aug 16, 2008 | 1 comment

Here are a few random details and thoughts from a sleepy mind. Maybe they can get less random later, with a bit of editing.

The format

Similar to a typical concert day, but with tutoring:

  • Afternoon rehearsal
  • REALLY GOOD MEAL 🙂
  • Short evening concert

The music

  • A Haydn motet with dramatic orchestral accompaniment. I don’t have a note of the title with me, but it includes the word insana (Choir and orchestra)
  • Mozart, Ave Verum Corpus (Choir and orchestra)
  • A short symphony by J C Bach (not J S Bach; a descendent who wrote early classical music) (Orchestra only)
  • J S Bach cantata Jesu, meine Freude (Choir and harpsichord; we didn’t play)
  • Fauré, Requiem (Choir, organ and orchestra)

The orchestra

Small. If we’d all played in everything, it would have consisted of

  • 5 violins
  • 4 violas
  • 4 cellos
  • 1 double bass
  • 2 horns
  • 2 oboes
  • Timps
  • Harp
  • Organ

But in fact the instruments required varied quite a lot from piece to piece; in particular, there are two versions of Fauré’s Requiem, both beloved of viola players, and the one we used is for a highly unusual combination involving full viola and cello sections and just one, solo, violin–who was me. Furthermore the violin only plays in two out of the seven movements. This brings its own special stresses–see below.

The players were a mixture: some students from the course, and some outside players like me. One of the oboe players was someone I used to know from work some years ago, which was nice. And some familiar faces from previous occasions were missing, because of holidays and so on. But you can’t have everything…

The rehearsal

In the rehearsal, the student conductors took turns to conduct a movement of one of the pieces, which they would then be conducting in the evening concert. They had been allocated strict time slots, to ensure everyone had a fair go; all managed to make good use of their rehearsal time. The conducting tutor made comments as necessary. The more accomplished students were given the more difficult movements or pieces to conduct, and this had been done well–there weren’t any moments of terror as to whether the conductor would manage to do what was required. (Or at least, no terror on the part of the players.)

It’s hard to say much about the tutoring aspect since it was mostly small last-minute detail, though we did do one exercise which comes up every so often: the orchestra is asked to try to rush, and the conductor has to try to slow us down. There are techniques for doing this, which are quite difficult to rush against. But this was an orchestra of quite experienced players, and on this occasion we won 😉

The format was slightly different from previous years; previously we’ve had an orchestra-only session in the morning, then an afternoon session with the singers present, then a late-afternoon concert. The orchestra-only session has been the one where conductors and players were most relaxed, and where there was most opportunity to give feedback to the conductors. This time the rehearsal felt very like a dress rehearsal with a looming concert deadline, meaning that it was more like the normal experience of getting ready for a concert. So we were better-behaved than we might otherwise have been 😉

The Fauré was the first piece to be reherased, which was actually quite uncomfortable: I had to sit through several movements of the piece, rather than play and get warmed up, and then play my solos “cold”. Unsurprisingly, I was much happier with how I played the solos in the concert than at the beginning of the rehearsal. But people made nice comments afterwards, so that was OK.

The singers

There was a large choir consisting of people who were there for the singing part of the course. I always have trouble estimating numbers of people, and usually get it too low, but my guess is around sixty people. And it was good singing–I think the people who go on this course are similar to the ones who go to chamber music weeks for string players and so on: amateurs who take their music seriously and who look forward to an event where they can do it well 🙂

The soloists were also very good. I’m extremely critical of most solo singers, especially the ones with very operatic vibrato. Well there wasn’t any of that: just good, musical singing with a nice tone (and some vibrato, yes–but tastefully used and never excessive). One of the highlights of the Requiem concert was the singing of the soprano soloist in the Pie Jesu, which was superb. Everybody told her so too, which is good 🙂

The concert

This was enjoyable. And unusual (for our parts of it) in that the orchestra faced away from the audience, so that the conductors faced the audience… but this was presumably for the very good reason that actually, the audience consisted mainly of

  • the large choir mentioned above
  • conductors who were awaiting their turn at conducting.

Actually the only negative feature of the concert was the hot weather. Unfortunately we (the orchestra) didn’t get ourselves organised enough in time to decide unanimously to play without jackets, which I for one would have found much more comfortable. (I don’t like being too hot, and neither am I happy about dripping sweat onto the violin…) So at the beginning I thought I was going to have quite a lot of difficulty playing. But fortunately, the temperature fell to a more manageable level as the evening progressed.

But every time I play for this event I wonder what it must be like for the conductors who are also singing–they will sing in the choir for part of a piece, then come to the front to conduct the next part. How on earth do you sing in a relaxed way, knowing that in a few moments it will be YOUR turn to hold the performance together?

We got a break from playing while one of the groups sang the Bach cantata. It was quite an ambitious one, full of complicated counterpoint which they sang well.

And at no point during the concert was I worried that any of the conductors might not cope–the playing all felt safe. The only alarming moment was when the one who started the Haydn motet off launched into it at a speed which I think was considerably faster than he’d intended… but everyone survived and it was certainly dramatic 😉

The different format this year meant that I didn’t hear some of the groups singing that I have done before–in particular I’ve looked forward to hearing the Advanced Singers performing quite difficult unaccompanied songs to a high standard. Sadly we were there on Friday for the accompanied singing, and they would be performing on the Saturday. But still, a very enjoyable event.

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