Even at the height of finals week (now blissfully in the past tense) I have continued exploring the spectrum of musicianship from the very-narrow-and-specialized to the very-broad-and-generalized. Musicians typically fall somewhere along that graduated scale, with few dwelling at the extremes at either end. Such has been the subject of my past two postings.
At present: the effects of narrow specialization on the musical community as a whole. Over-focus on a single issue or activity has its advantages, but may prove detrimental in the larger scheme of things.
To start with a non-musical example, consider the mindset of a person whose entire religious experience has been confined to one single creed, and who has never come into contact with any other. (Such folks used to be fairly common, but you can still find them easily enough — try Iran, or Alabama.) Thus a hardshell evangelical Southern Baptist, utterly unaware of spiritual plurality, might consider his religious beliefs and requirements to be unimaginably different from that of the Lutherans. But compare my hypothetical hayseed with a person well-dosed in comparative religion — conversant with Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and (oh, let’s have some fun here) Jainism. For such a person, the differences between Southern Baptists and Lutherans are likely to shrink to insignificance while their commonalities loom far larger.
Now out of the churches and into the conservatories, where a tired old argument refuses to die even though most right-thinking musicians reject it. From time to time somebody digs it up, fires up the electrodes on its neck, and sets it lurching across the countryside. The damn thing is as tiresome as evangelical creationism, and just about as hard to eradicate.
The argument holds that singers learn music differently from all other musicians, and therefore should be taught eartraining separately.
I hasten to add that not all singers are on board this particular battlewagon — in fact, a goodly majority are not. Nonetheless, due to a recent outbreak of bacillus distinctus voci I took an informal poll of voice-folk and found a direct corollation between the singer’s overall musical culture and his or her take on the notion above. Simply put: the broader the musical culture, the less the voice-folk subscribed to the idea. Those voice-folk who have an extensive musical background, often including instrumental training, completely rejected any idea that all singers are inherently different from all instrumentalists. My (admittedly tiny) sampling pointed to only those singers of minimal musical culture as considering their requirements to be inherently separate from the collective.
The notion is absurd on its face. If any singer can ever prove to me that the note on the second line of the treble clef is not G-natural for singers, or that placing a sharp sign before that note does not raise it by a half step for singers, or that an octave is not a 2:1 pitch ratio for singers, or that 3/4 meter does not mean three beats per measure for singers, or that quarter notes do not have twice the duration of eighth notes for singers, or that pianissimo does not mean “very quiet” for singers, or that Presto does not mean “fast” for singers, or that ternary forms have other than three sections for singers, I might be inclined to give the idea some credence. But all of us learn music that contains such information, and to the best of my knowledge it is the same information for all. We must all learn to respond, and there is no reason to assume that because one sings instead of plays that the mind processes the word Presto, the duration of a quarter note, or the number of beats in a measure, differently.
But why would singers of limited musical culture argue the point so strenuously? (Because they do; Gott in Himmel they do.) I would suggest that they speak from a lack of experience with music in all of its variety, and as a result, insignificant variations loom inappropriately large in their minds. They’re like those hardshell Southern Baptists contemplating Lutherans. For example: the notion that “singers only work with single lines” as an argument for vocal-instrumental apartheid. But the same is true of woodwind, brass, and to a lesser extent, string players. All of them need to work on improving their harmonic hearing, given their natural inclination towards horizontal thinking, and any eartraining teacher of even the most minimal competence knows what’s to be done about it.
Nor do singers have a monopoly of having to deal with breathing (wind & brass must consider the breath, while all other instrumentalists most definitely should do so.) Nor do I buy into the notion that all intonation issues for singers are exclusively technical — or at least that this renders them any different from, say, violinists, whose intonation problems also can be defined as exclusively technical, in that the fingers of the left hand must be trained to move with precisions measured in fractions of a millimeter. Everybody needs to work on hearing gradations of pitch, regardless of the mechanics for dealing with those gradations.
But only somebody who has worked with a wide variety of musicians, and has come to understand how they all approach music, can hear past the individual variations to the underlying theme itself.
That theme being that all musicians share a common heritage, and that the actual instruments we play are relatively insignificant. All of us are musicians first, and pianists/percussionists/oboists/violists/conductors/trombonists/singers/etc., second (or even last.) Folks who teach in conservatories know that all of us are telling our kids the same things; the student who goofs up his solfège exercises due to impulsiveness is almost certainly having the same issue in his private lessons, and very likely in his music theory and English Literature classes as well. The details vary; the issues themselves do not.
Thus to put a kid in “special ed” because she/he is a singer, or an oboist, or a composer, or whatnot, is far too narrow-minded for comfort. But that’s what limited musical culture gets you, and that’s why musicians of expansive view are critically needed as counterbalances.