​Singing as Navigation or The Many Ways to Find Our Way In Music
 
A conversation with Wolfgang “Marco” Amundsen (descended from Mozart/Polo/Amundsen (or so he claims) author of “How to Sing Your Way Out of the Shower”.
 
Interview by DR Shuteski (mediocre lifelong student of music)
 
DR: So I’m fascinated by the parallels you draw between how we get our bearings in music and all the innate skills animals and humans use to navigate the world.
WMA: Yes, what’s really remarkable is that almost always it is not just one thing. Always multiple skills are being used simultaneously.
DR: Can you give us an example?
WMA: Well birds are the most obvious example with their formidable migrations. Among the “tools” they use are sun clocks, internal compasses, very low infrasound waves, weather forecasting!, olfactory senses, landmark memory, and even imprinting--memories passed on from generation to generation.
DR: Incredible and how would you equate that to what a singer does when singing?
WMA: So there are really two levels here right? Humans being humans, we have to put a musical score in our hand first--a map if you will--which attempts to put down all the parameters, the compass headings, the landmarks, the topographic features and what not. But that is the boring part right? The interesting part, the part that brings the music to life, are all the other “navigational” skills we bring to the written notes.
DR: And these skills, you believe they may be biological and they are similar to actual navigation?
WMA: Sure, take homing pigeons for example. They find their way using visual landmarks (like notes on staves) and very low frequency infrasound (which is kind of like the background harmonic hum that the key in which a piece of music is written vibrates in the singers, like a deep cellular tuning fork). And they use olfactory clues (sort of like the mood or emotion of a particular musical section). And what is really cool and least understood, they use the magnetism in their very pigeon bodies to help them always and subconsciously align with magnetic north! This could be equated to how singers find and stay in tune in whatever key a piece is written in, sort of like magnetic inclination.
DR: Wow, I love this, so the written note is just a framework on which we singers….
WMA: Right, the notes have no more or no less meaning than a point of longitude and latitude has. What makes the music is what we, the singer, the musician, add to that point--it’s relationship to other points that allow the music to chart a course, which is a whole series of points strung together will all kinds of input along the way.
DR: Human musical navigational input? Can you give me...
WMA: Right, here’s an example. Take Tone Clusters (which Dale Warland is somewhat skeptical of and Eric Whitacre loves (and Mr. Whitacre submitted one of his very first compositions to Warland which was rejected--kind of a neat confluence of harmonics in and of itself)).
Anyway, tone clusters are like when part of the sound seems to go off course, like some migrating birds that get separated by a storm. In order to rejoin the main migrating group the separate group needs to refix their compass heading (which they actually do using their internal magnetic compass systems to re-merge with the main group). And while this happens they are like two notes rubbing up against each other. Both groups needs to be forceful and confident in their respective “headings” so that they stay on course (in tune) and eventually merge and continue on in the greater harmonic structure of the piece!
DR: Wowza! So the score, the written stuff, is just a vehicle, a….
WMA: A jumping off point for making music! Right, exactly! It is all the other tools or skills beyond sight reading that makes the music. For example imprinting. Juvenile birds of some species fly their first migrations with mature birds to “learn” the route. Well, lucky western children are imprinted with musical maps practically from the moment of conception.
DR: Right, parents-to-be playing Mozart for the little embryo..
WMA: So when we hear Mozart or Bach, we can actually sense where it is going to go. It is on a certain level very predictable because we have learned the map reading skills to get from point A to point B in a Bach Cantata.
DR: Sounds like while this helps us in familiar musical situations it might actually….
WMA: Yes--limit our ability to navigate music that comes from a different map or a different part of the globe.Think about jazz improvisation and the Puffin.
DR: You mean those silly looking…
WMA: Exactly, they are born with many of the same navigational skills as other birds--the ability to memorize visual landmarks, internal compasses, olfactory senses, etc. but their migratory routes are not imprinted. Juvenile puffins leave before the parents on solo migrations which they make up themselves.They travel thousands of miles on an improvised migratory path and eventually return to where they started!
DR: That’s remarkable!
WMA: You know there is an old expression: “blinded by our vision” which is a beautiful way of saying, all too often humans live as though we only really need one of our five senses. In music, our fixation on finding the music in the notes on the page, on our obsession with the “map” can y “blind” us to actually making music.
DR: Like we have to use all our “navigational” skills to give the notes life!
WMA: Yes, precisely, or not precisely perhaps because music is a process of adjustment.
DR: Meaning?
WMA: Our brains, our entire neuro system in fact, is designed to process sensory information--the world as it is or the music as it is written--and make sensory adjustments using all our tools, from our internal “infrasound” harmonics to our auditory stereo processes (I haven’t even talked about how most peoples’ ears are not exactly symmetrical), to make the world--the music--as we want it.
DR: There is almost a spiritual level to all this.
WMA: Yes, maybe what we call “spirit” or spirituality is simply the sum of all humanity’s behavioural experience up to now being processed by us in this moment with the goal of making adjustments that will hopefully make the world--or the piece we are singing--more like we believe it should be in the future.
DR: Music and spirituality as navigation towards “heaven” or Utopia. Incredible!
WMA: Perhaps. To paraphrase Timothy Leary, “turn on and tune in”. Turn on and allow yourself to touch all your innate internal biological navigational skills to let you truly tune into to the music you are singing!
DR: Thank you so much for your time and your insights!
WMA: Time is a navigational tool as well you know, let me tell you about our internal sun clocks…....
 
Source Material: Supernavigators: Exploring the Wonders of How Animals Find Their Way, (The Experiment Press LLC, 2019)

While painting a room "Meeting House White", this writer had one of those random moments of euphoria that can turn an otherwise mundane task into a near spiritual endeavor. I was filling the roller tray, spreading drop clothes, making a cosy bed for the dog out of some old bedding. I took a look round deciding where to start and I hit play on the music machine and started rolling paint to the opening strings of the St Matthew Passion. I was getting into the rhythm just where the chorus enters for the first time and I began to sing along and lo, what’s this? “Come my joy!” The accoustics in the room were remarkable, like singing in an old church or a cavernous shower.
The room is what realtors call a “bonus” room. In this case where the adults in the house used to hang out and play poker and pool, or cozy up to the large wet bar of polished maple at the end of the room, complete with high swivel stools and a brass bar rail and watch sports on the large ceiling mounted TV.
As I was listening to opening sections of the Passion, where the talk is of the Passover meal, I imagined this would make a great room for a last supper, though I am pretty sure the Disciples and Jesus all sat at a long table and not around a bar. As I continued singing along to the chorales, I was giddy with the wonderful (so it seemed to me) sound of my voice and I imagined how I could use this space. “I know, I could start a small 8 or 12 voice chorus, the kind I always wanted to sing in and we could rehearse right here.” Of course, with a sinking sensation, I realized, I know virtually nothing about music. How would I ever start a chorus! But then the euphoria returned with a vengeance. How could I be so foolish, I already sang in the best chorus in all of downeast Maine! I didn’t need to start a new choir. All I had to do was do a lot of practicing so that I could hold my own with all the wonderful and talented singers of the Bagaduce Chorale.
So as I rolled and rolled that cavernous space, I played thru and thru the St Matthew Passion multiple times, trying to mind-meld my voice to the rehearsal tracks. And lo, by the time the last paint can was empty, though my euphoria had subsided, I felt a fine inner glow of confidence in the my mastery of the bass part and a new appreciation of the mystery and majesty of this masterwork by Bach!
Come hear that majesty and mystery and mighty music this coming weekend, May 10 & 11th in Blue Hill and on Sunday the 12th at Ellsworth High School. Accoustically speaking, it will be filled with sadness, sorrow, yearning, pathos, pity and above all else the euphoria of hope!

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Hikes, bikes, swims, paddles, dog days at the beach, weeding, mowing, watching the fawn grow (poor fawn found while mowing, almost lost, but now at home in the marshy pond area and our meadow, mommy dear around we hope!); summers here! But here in the moment when voice is most tuned, we (me) stop rehearsing. Yes, some of you choir "whores" sing anywhere, anytime, but I, me, I pledged my vo8ce to the Bagaduce 16 years ago and I stay true. It ain't much of a voice, but under the direction of our intrepid Music Director, my voice is about 10X what it was in 2005. And I am as old as dirt. So, the message here, the hook if you will, is start singing and keep singing. You have no idea where it might go!

A great time was had by all at the Chorale After Party on a beautiful May evening at the wonderfully accommodating Blue Hill Farm Inn. This legendary event on the Blue Hill social calendar was attended by more than 90 singers, family members and friends who turned out to celebrate the season, and, more importantly, Bronwyn Kortge’s fifteen year tenure as Music Director of the Bagaduce Chorale.
After cocktails, appetizers and a delicious main course, festivities got underway with some opening remarks by Chorale President bigmouth Moi, who was, for the most part, coherent, with only a few mystifying digressions and, incredibly, just one off-color joke. Master of Ceremonies Gerry “Takin’ the High Road” Freeman yanked Moi from the floor and proceeded with the evening’s festivities.
First up was the newly established “Bagaduce Chorale Volunteer of the Year Award” to recognize the Chorale member whose service to the Chorale goes above and beyond. The first annual recipient was Dede Johnson who has, year after year, done the layout and graphic design work for the program books. Dede has put up with tons of pesky emails, innumerable last minute changes, missed deadlines (and frequently having to rush to get layouts done over Thanksgiving weekends). Gerry presented Dede with a Certificate of Appreciation custom designed by Dawn & Gerry (A hilarious spoof of “good” graphic design, replete with typos, a chaos of mixed fonts, and signed by our BORED PRESIDENT). In addition Gerry presented Dede with Ola Gjeilo’s Northern Lights CD sung by the incomparable Phoenix Chorale.
Next up was the presentation of “the gifts” and for some reason Gerry choose “home” as the theme tying the presents together. Douglas received a charming log cabin incense burner along with a $100 gift certificate to Arborvine.
Bronwyn also received a log cabin incense burner along with a charming illustrated children’s book called “HOMES” by an Oregon artist packed with drawings of homes in all their varied permutations. And then Gerry presented Bronwyn with a pair of lovely earrings designed by an Oregon artist that feature Oregon red sunstones. In case you haven’t put 2 + 2 together, Bronwyn was born and raised in Oregon, so Oregon would be her, ta da, “home” state. Plus, she also has a thing for rocks and stones that seems to have been passed down to her from her rock hound-father (we all have our crosses to bear, some are just heavier to carry around).
Next up, former president and longtime Chorale member Rich Howe offered his thoughts on Bronwyn’s first year and a touching recounting of the first time he saw Bronwyn (on the stage at The Grand during a G&S production). And this was followed by the eagerly anticipated Talent Show.
First up was Sarah on guitar doing a Brandi Carlisle (I think) song about being in the eye of a hurricane. This was followed by an utterly charming performance of The Daisy Song by Thea & Dell, two precociously talented gradeschoolers who were guests of our harmonica player, Ken Weeks. This was performed complete with hand gestures and pitch-perfect two-part harmonies. It was forty seconds long, exactly, forty perfect seconds!
Gerry than wowed the audience with his jeopardy like questions for new definitions of musical terms like rallentando and molte ritard (this seemed to be about the President of the Chorale somehow, but was way beyond his understanding).
Megan then played a delightfully simple flute piece, which, evolved into an incredibly complex series of variations that made us all realize (as if we didn’t already know this!) what a remarkably talented and natural musician she is. Wow, wish she had flunked something at GSA this year so that she could stick around for another year, but alas, college calls.
Dalyne than followed with a luminous poem titled “Merge”. If your humble reporter ever gets caught up on things, this poem will be posted on the webpage or facebook or something. This was followed by someone pretending to be both a poet and a singer, although the consensus of the audience seemed to be that he was merely an egomaniac who likes to hear himself talk and sing. He offered three very small, very simple, and very lightweight poems ostensibly celebrating our intrepid Music Director (with hard-to-fathom commentary in between (as stated above, he sure does like to hear himself talk)). And this “reading” was followed by a vocal tribute to Bronwyn (he was presumptuous enough to claim to be “singing this on behalf of all Bagaducians past and present”! The nerve!). Using (or so he claimed, with his barroom style of singing it was difficult to decipher a tune at times) an Irving Berlin tune “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” which became “Bronwyn we adore thee” he managed to get thru the song twice, because, what can I say, this guy just doesn’t know when to shut up.
All in all, a remarkable night after a remarkable program of songs that thrilled the audience and sent us all out into the night, burning so much more brightly, as we wound, wended and wandered our various ways home.
Still burning brightly, I remain your humble scribe
ras
 

Dale Warland on what needs to happen before a choral group can  make great music:
“Until all the essential details are in place, you cannot really begin making music. When I say “markings,” I don’t just mean only where you breathe but also exact pronunciation, dynamic changes, all the phrasing, the divisi assignments, et cetera…I try to instill what I would term basic or fundamental expectations. These are essential to start with before you can even think of making great music.”
Gee, Dale, notice you don’t even mention that other “essential detail”, better known as the notes. Seems like your assumption is that the notes are mastered outside of rehearsal and then all the “essential details” are added on top of them, and then, and only then can you expect to start “making music.” Which raises the question, if you come to rehearsal and you don’t even know your notes, how on earth do you expect to make music?
Ingemar Stenmark, possibly the greatest and most fluid ski racer of all time, could run a slalom or giant slalom course like nobody's business. People studied his technique, frame by frame, trying to figure out what he was doing that made him so much faster than everyone else. There were a couple of theories. One that he used wedges in his boots to boost the transition from downhill edge to inside edge at the top of the turn. Another was that he skied in what was referred to as the “A-Frame stance” and if you watched him ski you could see where that idea came from.
But I have my own theory about why he skied faster and more precisely thru slalom gates than anyone else. He did use the A-frame stance to roll from downhill to inside edge, effectively starting a new turn while still riding the downhill edge from the old turn. And he did use wedges in his boots, but so did a lot of other skiers back then. No, what I believe made him so fast was that he was better than everyone else at memorizing the course. Every ski racer tries to do this, to visualize every gate, every roll in the slope, every steep pitch, every side slope, so that when they kick out of the starting gate they are thinking one and two and three turns ahead. This is what allows you to set up for a gate instead of just trying to get around it.
Imagine if you a just a fraction late for a gate, the next gate you are a little bit later, and by the third gate you are off the course. Imagine Ingemar, he sets up above the first gate and knows just when he has to roll of that turn and into the next to get a highline on the next gate. Multiply this over 60 or 70 gates and you get lots of fractions of seconds disappearing and you end up high man on the podium.
Now imagine the Bagaduce Chorale is singing “Music Down in My Soul”. Imagine the printed music score is like a slalom course, each bar like a slalom gate, each run of gates (flush, open, closed) like a line or phrase in the piece, each roll, dropoff, side slope, is like the dynamic markings. So to be the world’s fastest slalom skier or the world’s most excellent choral group, you need to know the gates/music intuitively so that you can anticipate and prepare for the next and the next and the next run of gates/musical phrases.
Monday night’s rehearsal was the best of times and the worst of times. We were able to “run” most of the music (sort of like making most of the gates but not quite all of them and what that gets you is a disappointing DNF).  But, while running the music is fun, very few of us were anywhere near “making music.” Any competent skier can run gates, just as any competent singer can sing notes. But to run gates like Ingemar, or to sing The Road Home like the Dale Warland Singers requires a long, hard road of preparation to build the base on which music making can occur.
Dickens always seems timely, …”it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope…” it was the time of hard practice, it was the time of great artistic rewards….we hope!
 

“Our business is recreation and resurrection – when we sing, we bring the dead to life” Robert Shaw, founder of the Collegiate Chorale (“a melting pot that sings” RLS).
Last night there was a piece on BBC America about the 175th anniversary of the founding of the Vienna Philharmonic. We were watching with some interest as they showed clips of legendary conductors and glittering audiences (did you know there is a six year wait for subscription seats, guess classical music is alive and well in Vienna). Towards the end of the piece they were talking to a retired clarinet player about what made the Philharmonic unique. He talked about the unusual social/democratic structure that makes the players as powerful as the conductor. He talked about how his father and his grandfather both played in the Philharmonic before him. And then he said something seemingly banal that nonetheless really resonated.
In the background the orchestra was playing the Skater’s Waltz, the strings pulling and stroking to create the sensation of the skaters’ blades pushing off and carving and arcing across the ice. And the retired clarinet player said every musician in the Philharmonic was striving for “the moment in music that allows our heart to speak.”
In that phrase, he captured the essence of what making music is all about and why we do it. We strive to learn the notes, to master the timings, to listen for the interweavings of voice parts, to incorporate the dynamics, to shape our vocal instrument to make beautiful sounds, all to conjure what the composer heard in her head and heart during the moments of creation. But what is truly magical about this process, what “allows our heart to speak”, is the fact that the performance of music can become more than the sum of its parts, that all the individual elements of the composition go thru some strange unknowable alchemy to create an emotional channel between singers and audience.
Thinking of some of the pieces in the spring concert, Homeward Bound, There Will Be Rest, Deep River, well, actually, just about all of them, the “heart” is pretty easy to spot in most of the lyrics. But that doesn’t mean that just by mastering the building blocks of the songs that we can open our “heart” to the audience. Just as the composer brought something to the creative process besides the tools of composition, we as singers must bring something from within ourselves, from our hearts, to help free the music from the bondage of staves, bar lines, notes, and markings. We must reach deep into our dark and dusty memory vaults to unlock our own emotional connection to the music. And when you think about it, the process from creation/composing to learning/performing is rather like first birthing the music, watching it die, and then standing awestruck (hopefully not because it begins to seem like an episode of “The Walking Dead”) as it is gloriously reborn in performance.

“To create a smooth legato line, sing vowels only until the vowels align with the beat. Then add the consonants back in "on top" of the vowel line” (Robert Shaw, no not that Robert Shaw, the other one, the “Towering Figure” of choral music sound) .
.Suppose building a musical phrase is not unlike building a house. Suppose there are discrete pieces; foundation stones, lumber, steel, windows, hardware, that, in careful combination, can create a homey cottage, a stunning light filled contemporary, or a garishly baroque overindulgence, like say, oh maybe, Mar a Lago. Well, Shop Teacher/Music Director Kortge has been schooling us on the fundamental building blocks used to construct the perfect musical phrase and a dim bulb lit up in this writer’s brain when she asked us to do a simple exercise that “could change your vocal technique forever and ever.”
Try, said MD Kortge, to sing a phrase leaving out all the consonants, all those hard-edged plosives and fricatives, those pesky phrase “disrupters” that can so totally take the “line” out of a musical phrase. Par example: the song “The Road Not Taken” by Randall Thompson, lyric by Robert Frost. Imagine the opening line “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” with all those “disrupters” removed. What is left? “oo awoods eevehgd ihn ah ehllawoow oouhd”, all the vowel sounds (or something like this). So imagine the notes, the beats, in the line are the foundation of this phrase, some short, some long, all moving forward to the end of the phrase. The vowel sounds are the framework that builds upwards from the foundation, carefully “aligned” with the beats of the “foundation.” Now imagine the dynamics of the line are the siding,windows and doors of the phrase. And finally, imagine the hardware, the doorknobs and all the little doodads are the consonants, plosives, fricatives, sibilants and such, some hard-edged, some gentler, more subtly suggested.
Now here is the key thing; in order for the phrase to have “structural integrity” (not falling flat, not offending the listener’s ear) the vowel sounds need to be sung on the beat and the consonants need to be sounded just a wee little smidgen before the beat. And herein, eureka: another revelation (a slightly brighter bulb this time in writer’s cobwebby head). To wit, the only way to keep a phrase/line moving forward with the energy required to make it a thing of beauty is to understand that those dastardly “disrupters” need to come slightly before the beat. Otherwise as a phrase is sung, the singer will be falling behind the line, which results in rushed, less beautiful vowel sounds, and this leads to a bloating song “circle”. And the bigger the song/circle becomes the less it comes to represent the thing of beauty the composer first heard in her head. Or to put it another way, suddenly your dream home is way over budget, foundation and framing are misaligned, and, before your very eyes, it begins to wobble and weeble in the wind and here and there, little doodad consonants begin to break free from the line, carried away on the huffing wind of the not-quite-with-it chorus.