Thoughts

My choir is preparing Christ Rising Again (a very difficult polyphonic piece) by William Byrd. One of my choir members posted this to the rest of us. I just love this, and agree with it, so I thought I’d share it here.

William Byrd (1543-1623) was the first of the great English composers.  The leading musician of the Elizabethan era, he was a renowned organist and in one of the obituaries that followed his death was described as a “Father of Musicke.”  He also wrote on music, and in the preface to his Psalmes, Sonnets & Songs, published in 1588, he set down these reasons “to perswade every one to learne to sing” :

William Byrd’s Eight Reasons for Singing 

1. It is a knowledge easely taught and quickly learned, where there is a good Master and an apt Scoller.
2. The exercise of singing is delightfull to Nature and good to preserve the health of Man.
3. It doth strengthen all parts of the brest, and doth open the pipes.
4. It is a singular good remedie for stammering in the speech.
5. It is the best meanes to procure a perfect pronunciation, and to make a good Orator.
6. It is the onely way to know where Nature hath bestowed the benefit of a good voyce; which guift is so rare as there is not one among a thousand that hath it; and in many that excellent guift is lost because they want Art to express Nature.
7. There is not any Musicke of Instruments whatsoever comparable to that which is made of the voyces of men, where the voyces are good and the same well sorted and ordered.
8. The better the voyce is, the meter it is to honour and serve God therewith; and the voyce of man is chiefely to be employed to that ende.

Since singing is so good a thing,
I wish all men would learne to sing.

Force & Flow. Intellect & Instinct. Effort & Ease. Yin & Yang.

My old voice teacher, Clayne Robison, used to talk about the balance of force and flow in singing. His theory was that force and flow were two ends of a scale. If you were all force in your singing there would be no sound because there was no flow. The opposite is also true, if you were all flow you would only hear breath and no vocalization. The magic point, right in the middle, was where you would find a boost to the power and beauty of the voice.

He would talk about this principle in terms of math as well. Say your force is at 3 and your flow at 7 (you can divide up any even number and get like results), your power factor is only going to be 21 (7 x 3). But if you divide your force and flow equally (5 x 5) you get an extra boost and your power factor will be 25.

I think this applies to a lot more than just singing. Let’s take a look at composition and music itself. The absolutely most engaging music is going to contain an equal balance between force and flow. In this case, a balance not of air flow to muscle use, but of instinct and intellect. On the one hand, music that is conceived purely on an intellectual level may be interesting, but is not likely to be very moving. On the other hand, music formed completely from natural instinct (try to remove all cultural teaching as well) is likely to be on the level of banging rocks together and grunting; not very interesting (though maybe humorous).

What is music for though? This force/flow theory brings up another possibility in my mind on this question. What if music helps us balance our life? What if when our life is filled with force (stress, anxiety, etc.) what we really need is music that is more on the flow side, to balance us out? The opposite also being true, what if our life is a kind of boring, passive, day to day rut? Wouldn’t we crave music that would bring us thrills and excitement?

Just thoughts. There are of course many factors beside instinct and intellect that would come into play if this was the case, I don’t need to go into them all, but that might explain why we have so many different types of music, as many types as there are kinds of people.

Of course, music might be used to augment rather than to balance. Just thinking on screen . . .