When I was a boy, the gold standard in choruses was the 360
member Mormon Tabernacle Choir. This
was, as the name suggests, the choir of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake
City, Utah, and it seemed to consist of every able-bodied non-tone-deaf Mormon
within a one hundred mile radius of the Tabernacle. Pictures of the choir [no television in those
days] showed banks upon banks of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses, standing
on risers that seemed, like Jacob's Ladder, to ascend to the heavens. Although the choir clearly equated numbers
with musical power, it was a rather odd fact that as a musical group, they did
not make that joyous a noise. Rather,
they produced a muddy, indistinct sound that seemed to be coming from a
cathedral bedeviled by inconvenient echoes.
This odd contradiction between the sheer size of the choir
and its rather mediocre musical power was a consequence of a simple fact about
the generation of sound waves familiar to anyone who has ever sat in front of
an old monitor watching a sine wave rise and fall across the screen. Sound, of course, is generated by the
agitation of the gas particles in the air.
It travels in a series of expansions and contractions that are nicely
visualized by those old sine waves. When
you add a second sine wave to the first, it can either match the first
perfectly, in which case the combination is augmented by the addition of the
two magnitudes, or it can conflict with the first, in which case the
interference of the two waves diminishes the combined sound. The Mormon Tabernacle singers, numbered
though they were in the hundreds, were not, if the truth be told, very good
singers. They did not all sing on key
[or even, or so it seemed to me, in the same key], and their entrances and
exits were ragged. As a result, the
sound waves generated by their vibrating uvulae interfered with one another,
producing what I can only describe as a brown sound.
The truth of this observation was brought home to me powerfully
one evening in the late 40's [I was still in high school] when I attended a
concert at Town Hall in Manhattan by the newly formed Robert Shaw Chorale. Shaw was a dynamic young conductor with
radically new ideas about what a professional chorus ought to be. When the Chorale came out on stage, I was
astonished to see that there were no more than twenty or so of them. I was sitting in the peanut gallery, of
course, and I began to worry about whether I would be able to hear them. The singers, all hand-picked professionals,
did not group themselves into sections -- sopranos, altos, tenors, basses -- as
was the universal practice at that time.
Instead, they lined up in several ranks
man-woman-man-woman-man-woman. What is more,
instead of being bunched tightly together so that each one's left shoulder
seemed welded to the next right shoulder, they spaced themselves perhaps two or three feet
from one another. It was clear that Shaw
had some very unorthodox ideas about choral singing.
When they opened their mouths to sing the first notes of the
first composition, a blast of sound filled Town Hall, as audible to me near the
back of the second balcony as it must have been to the toffs in the expensive
seats in the orchestra section. The
reason for this astonishing power, of course, was that the singers were all
perfectly in tune and perfectly synchronized with one another. Their spacing, which succeeded brilliantly in
blending the different voices, was made possible by the fact that it was not necessary
to group all the sopranos near the one or two of their section who could be
counted on to find the pitch at an entrance or pick up a conductor's cue. Compare, if you will, the playing of a fine string quartet with that of a mediocre
orchestra.
These thoughts crossed my mind this morning as I reflected
on the odd failure of Romney's super-pac multi-millions to achieve any
measurable success in the campaign against president Obama. Why, I wondered, were the vast sums of which
Democrats were so fearful having so little impact on the race? Then I thought about Shaw and the Tabernacle
Choir, and I saw what might be an answer.
The Romney campaign, it occurred to me, is suffering from
the advertising equivalent of the self-defeating interference of the sound
waves issuing from choruses like the Tabernacle Choir. The Romney campaign is producing what
psychologists, reaching for the same analogy, call cognitive dissonance. Since
North Carolina is considered a "battleground state," our television
viewing is repeatedly interrupted by political thirty second spot ads. The Romney campaign started out pillorying
Obama as Other, un-American, out of touch with American values, a Socialist [I
wish!]. But that did not seem to have
any negative impact on his poll numbers, which most strikingly revealed that
Americans like the President, even when they disagree with him. Apparently cautioned by this evidence that
their efforts to make Americans fear and hate Obama were not working, the
campaign did an almost complete about face.
Now, the ads feature a syrupy voice saying that although Obama is a nice
guy, he is in over his head, and unable to deal with America's problems. The effect of these two series of ads, I
thought, is rather like the effect of having the altos in a chorus singing
slightly off key or out of synch with one another. The sound waves interfere with each other,
producing a muddy sound of no great power.
The same result is produced by the campaign's constant
shifts in its positions on such issues as "pre-existing conditions"
in health care reform or a voucher system to replace Medicare. Political junkies, like music mavens, might
be able to disambiguate the conflicting messages conveyed by the Romney
campaign's ads, but the general public, like the audience at a concert of the
Mormon Tabernacle Choir, just hears a blurred sound of no particular direction
or distinction.
I think they would have had more success with a sharp,
precise, clean message, however unfamiliar to the ear. Better a good performance of Pierrot Lunaire than a blurred rendering
of the Messiah.
2 comments:
Hey yeah, Pierrot Lunaire, great idea! That's my evening planned.
I loved that. The whole preface to the argument was a pleasure to read. And I suspect you're right. There is no distinct message coming from the Romney campaign. None at all. Anyway, beautiful way to say it!
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