Language Barrier

[Ed. Note: The Management apologizes in advance for the approximately thirty-seven dozen references in this blog post, both in print and via hyperlinks, to “Star Trek” and “Star Wars”. This blog's author is a nerd.]

 

This week, I spotted an online question: what’s your favorite English accent? Half the responders thought the questioner meant “what’s your favorite accent from the British Isles?” and the other half thought he meant “what’s your favorite accent in which to hear English spoken?”  So I got thinking about both. What are my favorite accents, and why?

 

“It comes to pass oft that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent sharply twanged off, gives manhood more approbation than ever proof itself would have earned him.” –William Shakespeare

“A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.” -Lee Strasberg, acting instructor

“I personally am not conscious of my accent.” -Jared Diamond, American author and scientist

I live in New England, so I probably have a touch of New England in me, but I try to downplay it. If I catch myself pronouncing “there” as “thay-uh”, I stop and think, “no, no, no, no, no.” Why do I do that? Because I hate the New England accent? Hardly. But I try to be careful. Hmmmm.

Background: my standard line is, “my mother grew up in New Jersey, my father grew up in England; we moved to Massachusetts when I was a year and a half old: I got nothin’.” It’s mostly true, possibly thanks to the amount of time I’ve spend amongst people other than New Englanders.

Historically, I’ve been an accent sponge. My favorite story about this comes from my senior year in high school: our music ensembles traveled from Massachusetts to Quebec in the first half of a “home-and-home” exchange trip with high school musicians from Rosemere, a suburb of Montreal. We lived with the families of many of the Rosemere musicians, so for three days we were immersed in the accent of the area. Upon our return home, we jumped off the buses and were met by our parents… and after I spoke exactly five words to my parents, they were chuckling at me. “What?” I said. “You’ve been in Canada,” they said. “Well, yes,” I said, “what’s your point?”

In a really flat and nasal version of a Canadian accent, my Dad said, “You sound just like a hockey coach, eh?”

Oh fine. Guilty as charged. So I’ve got a pretty good ear… ease off!

 

So. Thinking about the various accents that have crashed down on me throughout my life…

[] The Boston Accent. Stereotypically, we pahk the cah in Hah-vid Yahd, but there are other elements to the thing that make it both charming and irritating. Depending on the speaker, the thing can make a person sound either dashingly Kennedy-politician-esque or as dopey as, well, Mayor Quimby of the Simpsons’ city of Springfield. I get a grand kick out of the “Car Talk” guys, but others may not. A college friend of mine from Pittsfield, out in the far west of Massachusetts, had (to my ear) very little of an accent, except that if she was talking about one-fourth of something, she referred to it as a “quotter”.

Well okay, I guess we’re working our way east to west in the United States, so…

[] The New York Accent. Or at least the New York City-centered one. If it’s a Brooklyn accent, to me it just makes everything sound funnier. Thanks, probably, to a combination of Bugs Bunny cartoons, the Marx Brothers and the Abbott and Costello “Who’s On First?” routine. As for the 1010-WINS radio news reader accent, the cultured Manhattan thing … that is a different thing altogether. Until Los Angeles became the entertainment production capital of the United States, a New York accent was the sound of entertainment. (Ever heard an World War II-era newsreel narrator? Check out the opening 20 seconds of any episode of the animated “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” shows for an attempt at the modern equivalent.)

As a close cousin geographically and sonically of the New York accent, the New Jersey Accent has no better proponent than my mother. Born and raised in New Jersey, she has taken no end of abuse from New Englanders (who ought to exercise caution when mocking accents) for her pronunciation of certain words. Because man’s best friend is in fact a Doo-awg.

[] The Pennsylvania Accent. I never knew there was such a thing until I experienced the work of a particular couple of band instructors in college. Then I figured it out, and then some. I still can’t reproduce it on cue myself, but every so often a hint of it slips out and I think, “oh – Pennsylvania.” Not to mention the Philadelphia schtick of a certain summer colleague of mine (which I suspect is a touch over-the-top… then I wonder if perhaps it’s not).

[] The Min-ne-SO’-ta Accent. If for some reason you think either the movie “Fargo” or Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” crew are overexaggerating it, you need only listen to listen to national talk radio shows and hear “Ken from Minneapolis” … and holy smokes, it turns out they’re soft-pedaling it. Extra-credit proof: Michele Bachmann. In general, the generic Midwestern accent gets spoofed quite a bit … and some of that treatment might be at least a touch accurate. There are moments when a Midwesterner’s nasal, flat, wide “o lemme tell ya ’bout dat” is indeed as wide and flat as the Plains. Now, how is it that a Chicago native says “God” and a Bostonian says “guard” and they sound the same?!

 

“I used to say that whenever people heard my Southern accent, they always wanted to deduct 100 IQ points.” -Jeff Foxworthy, comedian

[] The Southern Accent. I take a risk by being a New Englander and commenting at all on the Deep Southern Drawl, I recognize that. Save your cards and letters for a more important issue, please. I like listening to Jeff Foxworthy’s stand-up act, and Minnie Pearl always cracked me up! When I make my voice into the southern college football referee – “we have holding! (holding! holding!) on th’ dee-faynse! (dee-faynse! dee-faynse!) Fifteen yards an’ an automatic firs’ down! (firs’ down! firs’ down!)” it’s out of a wish that all referees could sound that way.

But for every example of the Georgia-and-environs drawl that may cause its purveyors to sound less than fully connected with human intelligence, I would offer any speech by Roy Blount Jr. It’s more than just “ah do declare” and “frankly, Scah-lett, Ah don’t give a damn”. When one wishes to make a pungent point, there might be no better accent in which to do it.

[] The Texas Accent. Maybe the best one in which to exude swagger. As a political observer, I have had lots of opportunity to check out this version of English expression. To my ears, for every Molly Ivins, adding three layers of smart and funny to a phrase, there’s a Rick Perry adding three layers of dim. And then, for three added layers of greed and evil, watch the documentary “The Smartest Guys in the Room”, about “Kenny Boy” Lay and the other corrupt sons of guns of the Enron scandal, based in Houston. Phew. Swagger firmly on display, earned or not.

 

Now. As long as I had an English father, I figure that’s my qualification for examining accents from across the Pond – or perhaps my excuse. And I will limit myself to that. I truly would love to hold forth on things like the French accent (my first exposure: Inspector Clouseau!), the German accent (I first heard it up close from my Dad, while he was creating different voices for bedtime story characters: Dennis the Dachsund was from Munich, no doubt!), and the Russian accent (Ensign Chekov; did you really have to guess?) … I’m not knowledgeable enough. But the British Commonwealth nations? Them, I can talk about…

 

“Americans like the British kind of quirkiness and the strange accent. They find it kind of cute or something, with a certain charm.” -Nick Park, co-creator of “Wallace and Gromit”

If you were from England, and you spoke briefly with my Dad, he could tell where you came from to within about 20 miles. And apparently this is not uncommon.

 

“I learned to change my accent; in England, your accent identifies you very strongly with a class, and I did not want to be held back.” -Sting, lead singer/bassist, “The Police”

Well, heck!: “My Fair Lady” is a whole Broadway musical about how what you sound like can affect your public image, your prospects for career advancement, your economic status, almost everything about you, in England at least.

[] Many many English Accents, therefore: the Upper-Crust… the Cockney accent… the Midlands (the Beatles)… Ian Darke’s soccer calls… and a remarkable number of extremely local variants of each, and more. And that’s just within the borders of England, never mind the rest of the United Kingdom.

I always thought that “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” was just funny stuff; the more I look at it, the more I realize that those gentlemen’s ability to mimic regional accents did as much to sell their satirical commentaries on British life as the actual dialogue did. (Thanks to their “Holy Grail” bit about the Holy Hand Grenade, I cannot listen to the annual radio broadcast of the Christmas Eve service from King’s College without chuckling.) Although I must say that along with Peter Sellers’ Goon Show work, the Pythons made sure that I grew up thinking that anything spoken with any British accent was automatically funnier, too.

 

“I shouldn’t be saying this – high treason, really – but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren’t fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.” -Stephen Fry, comedian

“I love my accent, I thought it was useful in Gone In 60 Seconds because the standard villain is upper class or Cockney. My Northern accent would be an odd clash opposite Nic Cage.” -Christopher Eccleston, actor

True fact: all the members of the Imperial military in “Star Wars” (the bad guys) spoke in English accents (except Darth Vader, of course). All the Rebels (the good guys) spoke like Californians. Eddie Izzard has commented very expertly on this. Some of the “Star Wars” hardcover fiction writers have actually come up with a cover story to explain this: the accent of a native of the planet Coruscant — the capital of the Old Republic and then the Empire — is basically that of the House of Windsor. The accent is very cultured, very refined (English!). The Emperor apparently had a spectacular anti-alien bias (i.e. anybody not human), therefore the Imperial Navy officer corps is dominated by humans, therefore all the officers are from Coruscant, therefore they all sound like that. Clever reverse-engineering.

Also: for one single scene in Episode IV, Princess Leia adopted an English accent. The rest of the movie, she was regular ol’ Carrie Fisher, and many of us out here in Audience Land assumed it was a mistake. One “Star Wars” novel has deftly suggested that Princess Leia was doing this to mock Grand Moff Tarkin (played by Peter Cushing, owner of one of the ULTIMATE upper-class British accents of all time). Imagine! Mocking the chief Imperial Governor, possibly the third most powerful man in the entire Empire, to his face! –Ah, but his revenge? He blew up her planet. Think before you impersonate, folks.

[] The Irish Accent. I know very well that there is more than one sort of Irish brogue. But the Irish accent that I am familiar with just might be the most musical, melodic accent I know. It seems to me that Irish-inflected speech can’t be done in a monotone.

[] The Scottish Accent. When this accent is done right (by a faker) or done at all (by a native speaker), it is unmistakeable, and to my ears, makes every word more funny, or passionate, or sarcastic, or heroic, –just MORE. My first exposure to a Scots accent, obviously, was James Doohan as Scotty in “Star Trek”. Clearly that was not the best way to start a meaningful relationship with a brogue: the rolled R’s, and the use of the word “aye” without “sir” behind it, were nearly all he got right, sadly. The practitioners that I’ve since experienced have been, well, Scottish: therefore clearly a bit more authentic. Folk singer Jean Redpath… comedian Billy Connolly… and Simon Pegg as Scotty in the 2009 re-boot of “Trek”, which has potential to re-define the character!

 

“I played a lot of leaders, autocratic sorts; perhaps it was my Canadian accent.” -Leslie Nielsen, actor

[] The Canadian Accent. I have Canadian relatives. When they visited my house when I was 13, that was when I really focused for the first time on how Canadians aren’t just far-northern Americans. My cousins were all full of those constricted vowels, and indeed, whenever I hear a hockey coach interviewed, I think fondly of them. Beyond the stereotyped yet ever-present “eh”, there are all kinds of curious and to my ear very flattened sounding things about a Canadian accent. One can forgive Mike Myers, or the fine SCTV gentlemen who brought you Bob and Doug MacKenzie, since they, um, are Canadian.

[] The Australian Accent. Oh my Lord. Isolate British citizens on a Pacific island for a century or two, and you end up with curious speech patterns like: the “ay” vowel sound has become an “eye” (G’day!); and an “ee” vowel sound has been tacked onto the end of every word which in print would otherwise appear to end in an “oh” sound. “Hello(-ee), is there a pho(-ee)ne boath neeah’-boy, do you know(-ee)?” Amazing. And Crocodile Dundee is just the tip of the iceberg. (“Oys-beug.”) It sounds like an English accent and a Boston Brahmin accent had a head-on collision.

 

“But I just know from experience that accent wise, even if you’re an accent genius, crossing the Atlantic is the hardest thing in the world either way.” -Hugh Grant, actor

By the way: we all think that our particular accents are neutral, because we’re around them so much. Therefore, as an American, I find it amazing that British, Scottish, Irish actors can adopt an American accent. To me, it’s as if they had to sand down what they start life with … into nothingness; like temporarily sandpapering the rough edges off a block of wood. So okay: actor Ewan MacGregor (Scotsman) can adjust his accent to sound like Sir Alec Guinness (not a Scotsman). But he can also adjust his accent to sound like an American fellow?! And Hugh Jackman is as Aussie as they come, but when he’s Wolverine in the “X-Men” movies, he’s definitely North American. How does that happen?

Well, obviously it does…

 

“I think it’s sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent and have a good crack at doing that.” -Orlando Bloom, actor

“I think most British people who say they can do an American accent are so bad at it. I find it excruciating. I find it excruciating the other way around, too.” -Eileen Atkins, actress

One example of this is a BBC recreation of a Marx Brothers half-hour radio comedy show. British actors got close to decent impersonations of Groucho and Chico Marx, but not quite close enough. No blame, no shame: one of the great things about the Marx Brothers is that to imitate them well looks easy, and is very hard indeed. No doubt the British feel just the same way about Americans desperately trying to sound English (Kevin Costner and Christian Slater attempting the feat in 1991′s “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”).

 

Anyway. If you’re looking for a slam-bang ending, full of philosophy and wise musings and clever ways to tie together toss-off phrases (a/k/a loose ends) from throughout this post … sorry. No such luck. I guess I’m just continually amazed by how many different-sounding ways there are to pronounce words from one single language. It’s a wonder anyone can learn English to start with (all the different version of plural noun forms alone would be off-putting… “you mean it’s mouse/mice, but house/houses? Box/boxes, but ox/oxen? Hell with this, I’ll go back to speaking Spanish”), and then on top of that, how many different accents and brogues are out there, lurking, waiting to confuse not merely the “English as a second language” contingent but people from our very own US of A?

Makes my head hurt. Meanwhile, I gotta go make some suppah, before I siddown and watch the Broons play hawkey.

Perspective

The slight delay in blog posting hereabouts has had mostly to do with my month of July, which featured a whole lot of travel, at least half of which had to do with professional development.

First: to New Hampshire, for the New England Band Directors Institute, a three-day affair in which band directors from New England (and elsewhere) gather – with instruments – to attend workshops, to read new band literature, to be conducted by one or more massively influential band conductors, and to have our attitudes (unofficially) adjusted. We’re a relatively small group – people who are pretty passionate about a topic that maybe not a lot of other people may quite understand. If you’ve seen the movies “Mr. Holland’s Opus” or “Drumline”, at least in my opinion, you still might not understand it.

Then: to Gordon College, for a similar gathering of choral directors from Massachusetts. Same idea; same level of “the rest of the world may not quite embrace this subject nearly as tightly as we do”! Off the top of my head I can’t come up with any movies that have been made about choir directors, either. “The Choir”, maybe.

Then to the mid-Atlantic, for some professional development wrapped up in a vacation: my annual pilgrimage to the American Shakespeare Center, in Staunton, VA. Tucked away in the mountains of Virginia, this little theater is modeled after the one in which William Shakespeare his own self put on his, um, skits. And it’s populated by some really fine actors. This year I saw “Hamlet”, which is perhaps a bit less light than the plays I’d seen there previously – “Much Ado About Nothing” (in which the ASC made me forget Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson and Denzel Washington and Kate Beckinsale, and instead remember Sarah Fallon and Rene Thornton, Jr.), and “The Taming of the Shrew”. With all due respect: Shakespeare enthusiasts are passionate but they don’t usually get nearly the attention that Tom Cruise and things blowing up do, on the big screen. Sometimes for good reason: the English Department professor who taught the Shakespearean Lit course that I took during my sophomore year at UMass seemed just plain deranged sometimes – in his view, every single element of a Shakespearean play represented some sort of sexual imagery. (Sometimes, Doc, “the dagger I see before me, the handle towards my hand” is just a dagger!) Anyway, if you tell the average American someone that you adore “Twelfth Night”, they may wonder if you mean some sort of winter holiday celebration.

Most recently: my annual two-week total-immersion course in the art of the drum major, courtesy of the West Chester, PA and UMass-Amherst versions of the George N. Parks Drum Major Academy. Now, talk about a gathering of rather passionate and relatively not-understood people: not only are they what the media would condescendingly call “band geeks”, but these young people will be their bands’ “head band geeks”! And they’ll be taught by people who have made band directing, and also drum major instruction, a large and important part of their lives. A documentary about this activity may not guarantee a major TV network knockout ratings, exactly.

But for 13 summers, I’ve participated in what is, for me, arguably the most professionally and personally enjoyable fortnight of the year. Until this year, I got to work for George N. Parks, who may not have been well-known outside the marching music industry, but inside of it he was the top dog. How lucky I was, for 12 years, to be able to look over and say, “hey, Mr. Parks, how do?” while most of the students and other participants in the West Chester and UMass clinics would see him coming and whisper, “–that’s George Parks!” with a certain amount of hero worship audible in those whispers. He was a genuine Hall-of-Famer, after all. And following his passing this past year, the DMA company took a deep breath, gathered itself and continued on; and during my two weeks of immersion this summer, I got to watch another master teacher, Heidi Sarver, gather up the reins and lead students – and staff – through this experience.

More than once, we DMA staff members have watched the kids go from being slightly bewildered new DMA students to being truly passionate student leaders, and we’ve heard their explosive cheering and nearly-foaming-at-the-mouth reactions to the goings-on, led by Mr. Parks … and we’ve quietly remarked, “it’s a good thing they’re on the good side of the Force.” To an outsider, the exhortations of the staff and the responses of the kids could easily seem right on the edge of, or maybe further into the realm of, a cult. No one is speaking in tongues, mind you; but when 300 or 400 high school students suddenly bellow “Together! In! Out! Frozen! Up! With Pride! With Pride!” and the listener has no idea what any of it means, I can imagine that it can make for some nervous wondering.

(The kids are just describing how various body parts are, in the attention position, but it may not be totally obvious.)

 

It’s occurred to me that I actually belong to a number of groups that fit this description: they … WE … are passionate about a particular topic; we commit a great deal of our personal time to it; we don’t always understand why the outside world doesn’t also treasure that topic; and we get a little miffed when the outside world says things like, “…I don’t get it. It’s weird.”

I will of course list these.

[] Marching band. (As is partly chronicled above; as is surely chronicled in most of the posts in this blog since last September.) This is an activity that can create marvelous sounds and images; and, taught right, it can yield philosophies for life and strategies for dealing with people and events that can be used in a lifelong way. (“Band is a place for everyone.”) Or … it can be the silliest-looking thing on planet Earth. As my DMA colleague Jamie Weaver once said to a roomful of student leaders, “let’s be honest, gang, we’re running around a field playing instruments that shouldn’t be outside, waving flags, and wearing chickens on our heads.”

[] Musical theater. For the love of heaven, please let’s set aside the stereotypes about theater people and their particular orientations. Statistically speaking, most activities in the world feature one person out of every ten who’s not facing the same way as the other nine, and does that excuse abusive behavior? Sorry, no. … Anyway, musical theater: done right, it gives young people the chance to discover the fun of performance, in an environment where they don’t have to decide it’s what they want to do forever, but could! Done wrong, it sounds like the “Whose Line Is It Anyway” activity where two actors play a scene in different styles suggested by the audience: when someone calls out “community theater!”, the actors get stilted and awful and break character and giggle.

[] Curling. An intriguing sport that I don’t play, I just watch, probably for lack of opportunity – and the fact that if I crouch down to play catcher in baseball, at least I’m using two feet; if I go to launch the curling rock and have to slide along the ice, I’m quickly going from one foot to one backside and an elbow, and zero dignity. It’s a sport, but it doesn’t look like the four major spectator sports at all, and I certainly understand why other people might look at someone standing on a sheet of ice with a little broom in their hand and might cry out, as commentator Charlie Pierce has done, “…SPORTS?!!!?”

[] Left-leaning politics. Thanks to my upbringing and my observations during the later years of my public and collegiate education, I see certain issues certain ways. I have to work really hard to read right-leaning political essays and comprehend how anybody could view the same issues in such a different light. (My suspicion, based on some recent historical non-fiction that I’ve read, is that the radical, reactionary right-wing politics currently in vogue are only distantly related to the beliefs put forth as “classic” Republican platform planks.) That said, I have a few friends and colleagues who are Republicans and occasionally they’ve said things and I’ve seen their points. I like those people because sometimes they’re mystified by my politics but we’re still friends anyhow.

[] Star Trek. Enough said. … Although I will say this: in fourth grade, I wore a Captain Kirk shirt on school picture day. I do not do the equivalent thing now. I went to one Trek convention, in Boston in 1992, mainly because it featured Patrick Stewart as the keynote speaker and I’d go to the ends of the earth to listen to that guy improv for an hour. (On the subway, heading into Boston, I sat next to a family of four, also going to the convention … and Mom, Dad, Jimmy and Jane all wore full Starfleet uniforms. I decided it was okay for them and that I was okay where I was.)

So, once in a while you bump into a group of people, enthusiasts regarding a particular topic, who are so passionate that it blinds them to the possibilities that [1] their activity may not be the best thing since sliced bread, and that [2] other people who “don’t get it” should be allowed to “not get it” and not take abuse for it.

For example, I’m a big ol’ fan of “A Prairie Home Companion”, which may be the only remaining weekly variety show left on American radio. Every week, as my dad would have said, “I have my folksy humor batteries fully charged”. Late in the two-hour show, Garrison Keillor largely improvises a twenty-minute monologue purporting to chronicle the recent week’s current events in “the little town that time forgot”, Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average – and where all the characters are right on the edge of being stereotypical homespun, myopic and faintly backward Midwesterners. I have heard more marvelous parables acted out by these characters than I can count. The musicians on the program are some of the finest in America. The writing is superb. But plenty of Midwesterners, Lutherans and others have mistaken Keillor’s works for mockery. For every 99 Keillor admirers, there’s one listener that doesn’t get the joke, or doesn’t get that sometimes all it is is a gentle joke.

This summer, I read a book by the marvelous writer Sarah Vowell, called “Radio On”. It’s a diary of a year of listening to the radio. Vowell doesn’t just listen to one station in one city; she listens wherever she goes, to many different stations with different formats, and makes some very astute comments about sounds coming out of her radio and about large issues as illuminated by those sounds. Some of her comments rake NPR over the coals, but manage to avoid whitewashing NPR and its listeners as snooty elitists, while still making some good points about ways in which NPR could probably lighten up a bit. In a couple of chapters, Vowell dumps on Garrison Keillor pretty firmly. I happen not to share her disdain. She may be a little too acerbic and sharp-tongued and smart-ass by nature (which generally works for her) to appreciate Keillor’s act; but I wouldn’t begrudge her the opportunity to be so. I happen to like “Prairie Home” for a lot of reasons besides his observations about humans via his mythical little town, and I wish someone could explain it to Ms. Vowell in a way that would break through her deflectors (hello!; Star Trek nerd reference!) and help her understand what he’s going for. But I get why she and other people might not “get it.”

 

In my first job out of college, I worked in the light-manufacturing department of a biotechnology company. I often would assemble thousands of little plastic pieces, or do equally repetitive things, in a given week. For about three weeks that winter, I was (figuratively, and sort of literally) pinned behind my drill press while another manufacturing department member tried doggedly to get me to join his church. By the time those three weeks had become three weeks, it was borderline harassment. I finally whispered to my department supervisor that if Jacques (not his real name) said one more word to me about how great my life would become if I joined the Houston Church of Christ (not its real name; a singular organization not affiliated with the more well-known Church of Christ denomination) and about why the church I did attend was just not sufficient to ensure my ascent into Heaven at the end of this earthly life … then I was going to march straight into the office of the president of this 40-member company and take up his valuable time asking him to supervise the removal this yahoo from my life.

Astonishing how easy it is to stumble into situations where, inadvertantly, you can poke a nest with a stick – and run afoul of a swarm of True Believers.

So I try to forgive people for not understanding the meaning of “Starred Thoughts™”, or for not agreeing that Jean-Luc Picard became a better starship captain right around the beginning of season three, or for rooting for the Canadiens over the Bruins, or vice-versa. And I hope we can convince more people, someday soon, that if they do accidentally poke the bear, they should at least be left alive – figuratively, literally, whichever. Because if some of the people who populate our nation’s capitol have inadvertantly taught us anything in the past few weeks, it’s this:

A little perspective can only be helpful.

Zing!

It would be understatement to suppose that I hit a nerve with my most recent post, where I reacted rather strongly to Jackie Evancho’s singing. Clearly, I got under a few people’s skins; and this isn’t my usual tactic.  Neither is coming right back with an instant, knee-jerk response to a comment or two. But, here we are.

So, okay … I’m always open to the possibility that I got it wrong.

And certainly I’ve looked back at some of my posts here and thought, unaided by outside suggestion, “…my God, how self-absorbed did THAT sound??” Very. (On the other hand, if you can’t express your inner egotist in your own blog, where can you?)

Some of the comments in reply to that post have been thoughtful, and caused me to pause and think hard; and you can read them below that post. A handful of others … well, I don’t see the productivity of name-calling, so I didn’t approve those comments for display. “Idiot” I can handle, just as well as I handled it on the playground in third grade; the more crude stuff, well … the English language has hundreds of thousands of words in it, many of which are just as effective but so much more printable.

But, upon reading the occasional gentle epithet coming toward me, I did wonder how much of that sort of thing I really did level at Ms. Evancho, or anyone else, in that piece. Worth a look. So I went back and read the thing again, this time playing the part of someone outside my own head. It’s good for a fella, on occasion.

 

The main questions that I wanted to answer, to my own satisfaction (aside from the question of self-absorption, which I think I already took care of, above), were:

[1] Did I unjustly criticize a young musician? Most of the music teachers with whom I’ve studied have been very good at constructive criticism; and the ones I didn’t care for so much seemed adept at making the criticism cut just a little too close to personal. Therefore I should strive to go for the constructive. It causes my students to want to come back for the next rehearsal.

[2] Did I disguise my opinion as Fact? Any persuasive opinion piece will attempt to prove somehow that “the opinions expressed are those of the author and the author has got it right!”, otherwise it’s not much of an opinion piece. But not always best to assume that one’s word is law; so, again, worth a look.

[3] Did I personally attack Ms. Evancho? Other than commenting on her voice.  And here, I take pains to assure both my middle-school choristers and my church-choir colleagues that the activity of singing is one of the most vulnerable acts a person can achieve. The human voice is an instrument, but if it comes out sounding less than how you’d like it, you can’t exactly tap a valve or re-tune a string or cuss out the reed. Your instrument is YOU. So, it can sound a lot more personal when the critique seems to be of your personal possession rather than your student horn that really needs to be upgraded anyway.

[4] Also, the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So perhaps maybe I’ve been equivalently done-unto, except for the aforementioned couple of comments that you won’t read here.

So. Let’s see that blog post again, in slow motion…

 

First salvo: in the direction of PBS, and whether its Performances are always that Great. I’m a PBS/NPR guy and always have been; which in some corners instantly marks me as a cultural elitist, fairly or not. And even a broadcast organization as worthy as PBS will have its off days. But occasionally it will put up onto pedestals some musical performances that are full of sound and fury, signifying not much. They’re big and loud and attract attention, and are sometimes, I would go so far as to say, mediocre at heart. In a culture that increasingly celebrates work that is just not as good as it’s dressed up to look, PBS has the opportunity (some would say the responsibility) to be more discerning than commercial TV networks.

 

Next roundhouse: I seemed to beat on Jackie Evancho’s backup band and set designers pretty good. Okay:

[1] It’s television, so it does need to have a visual component; so if the columns were good enough for the Greeks…!

[2] My apologies to the pianist, if necessary. He didn’t miss a note as long as I watched — which is something I aspire to but will never achieve.

[3] In no way was I denigrating the orchestra members. I’ve played gigs that were “just a gig”, and it didn’t mean I put any less effort into the playing. And for every one of those second violins, there are legions of other violinists who didn’t get the gig, who wish they had, and were probably good enough to challenge for it. (And, for that matter, there are legions of singers out there who also deserve their own PBS specials!)

[4] The conductor was off-the-charts overdoing it. Speaking as someone who has conducted massed choir-and-orchestra works (Vivaldi, Britten, etc.) as well as the occasional marching band show, I can appreciate the effort it takes to hold the hulk together, particularly when distance (from you to the performers) is a factor. This gentleman is probably a good guy; but if your conducting pattern is that large all the time, what happens when you really need to show an accent?

 

But, to the main point: a second look at the treatment of our soloist. Again, the question: did I use a sharp stick on an 11-year-old?

[1] Personal attack is not cool, so I need to make sure I didn’t launch any here. I think I was telling the truth about Ms. Evancho’s interview style – well-spoken, polite; and honestly, when I was 11 could I have given that kind of interview? Even if David Foster had let me get more than a sentence in edgeways? If that’s a true window into what kind of person she is, well, score one for her.

[2] About the possibility of stage parents … I’ve interacted with enough of those to be able to see them coming a mile away.  Of course I don’t KNOW whether Ms. Evancho’s got them! One can, at best, hope not.

So, now, okay: I’ve found my first serious opportunity for rewrite.  [3] Let me re-write this sentence, then: “All I can really comment upon is her performance, and after having researched more of that, I still have just one word for the effect of Ms. Evancho’s voice: Creepy.” And perhaps “creepy” isn’t exactly the right word after all. “Disconcerting,” perhaps. But I can’t help it that my first impression of the singing (which you never get a second chance at) was not so much of wonder, but much more of wondering. It wasn’t an offhand remark, to invoke the voice teachers I know (teaching at all levels, from grade school to college) who might just back me up here. I can think of three right off the top of my head who would probably be very curious to work with Ms. Evancho for half an hour, just to see what was really going on.

[4] Now. The thing that is not fair game for critique is, as they say, “what God gave ya.” If the chromosomes lined up for Ms. Evancho (or Leann Rimes, or Daisy Eagan) in such a way that this is just plain ol’ how she sings, then who am I, who is anyone, to take a hack at her? Certainly not a mean-spirited hack. Charlie Parker played saxophone in a way that no one on earth had, or did, or has since; no reason to accuse him of some sort of artistic fraud. Hell, if the good Lord had decided to grace me with an interplanetary ability to instantly sight-read classical piano music … which He (She?) hasn’t … darn it … I’d be a bit sensitive if someone then said, “this kind of playing shouldn’t be coming out of this person.” Like some kind of law of the universe is being violated.

[5] I brought up Mozart because, well, Mozart was in fact a monumental “aberration, a freak of nature”; and his operas were in fact hailed by many of his contemporaries as Just That Good; only Mozart scholars can tell in a blind taste-test whether they’re listening to Early Mozart or Late Mozart. Sometimes the planets line up, skill sets are assigned, and astonishing heights of artistic ability are achieved by humans; and not just classical music humans either.

I also brought up Mozart because we’re still playing and listening to his stuff, centuries later. We’re still admiring the genius of Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles (talking of people who were brilliant performers as very young children), and Lennon and McCartney, decades later. If Jackie Evancho is singing five or ten years from now, or twenty, or forty!, and we’re still admiring her work, then I’ll happily clap too.

We’ll have to wait and see. But I suspect there are lots and lots of music industry people who are counting on this very young person with, clearly, a voice that deserves to attract attention!, to be their ticket to the big time or to more pledge dollars, right now. American entertainment has seen way too many very youthful performers hit big early and come to sad ends, or at least fade away into obscurity, and to what end? Sometimes only an autobiography that wonders, “what if?” and “if only”.  (Or a “Behind the Music” special.)

So maybe, in some sense, I was “creeped out, plain and simple” on her behalf, after all – and much more creeped out by the environment that probably will swirl around her for the next, well, however many years she’ll be thought of as a big deal. I wish her well, I really do. I hope it works out.

 

POSTSCRIPT: By the way. A note about the comments (many of which I approved for display anyway) which suggest that I could be the Worst! Music Teacher! In the World! for having written mean, callous, heartless things about an 11-year-old girl.

Just because I’m a music teacher doesn’t make my opinions the be-all, end-all authority on subjects like these. As I suggested above, I’ve known many music teachers who are not that good with kids! and I’ve tried desperately to avoid being like them. But, as long as we’re speaking of making assumptions without having proper evidence … before you pass judgment on a teacher, come visit their class for a while, please. I don’t take those comments personally but I do take them professionally. My experiences in this line of work have in fact underscored, to me, the importance of supporting students who pursue music; to make sure that I treat them in a way that is respectful and positive; to provide encouragement, rather than just error-detection and -correction – especially those students for whom a staggering amount of musical talent isn’t something they were born with, but who nonetheless really want to make the effort and participate in an activity they love – whether or not a spotlight ever hits them.