The Musician's Trust

By James Jordan and James Whitbourn

Drawing from their own experiences as conductors, composers, producers, and teachers, musical collaborators James Jordan and James Whitbourn bring the importance of trust to the forefront in this exploration, examining the many facets of this often mysterious quality within an individual and an ensemble context both. Among the topics the authors discuss are the building of trust among musicians; whether trust has a sound in individuals and ensembles; the gestures of a conductor that can inadvertently breed mistrust; trusting in one’s own musical judgments; and trust within an ensemble. This insightful book clarifies and celebrates the central role trust plays in musicianship and closes with a probing essay on the nature of stillness by Donald Sheehan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gia Publications
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781622770076

Book preview

Authors

Prologue

James Jordan

Writing from Two Sides

Creative work can be exciting, inspiring, and godlike, but it is also quotidian, humdrum, and full of anxieties, frustrations, dead ends, mistakes, and failures. It can be carried on by a person who has none of the soaring Icarus wishes to abandon the dark shadows of the labyrinth in favor of the bright sunshine. It can be free of narcissism and focus on the problems the material world furnishes anyone who wants to make something of it. Creativity is, foremost, being in the world soulfully, for the only thing we truly make, whether in the arts, in culture, or at home, is soul. (p. 199)

—Thomas Moore in Care of the Soul

Love, Joy and Peace are all Divine Gifts, Divine properties. They can work miracles even on their own. Love unites and makes everything whole; peace radiates from a person and exudes silence; and joy takes away the pain of the soul. (p. 188)

The Heart is always cold when the thoughts are scattered. It is only when the thoughts are gathered and centered in the heart that the heart begins to burn. (p. 192)

In the spiritual realm, thoughts are as clear as speech; they can be heard. (p. 197)

What is the velocity of movement of the angels? Angels are spiritual beings and the velocity of the spirit is equal to the velocity of thought. The velocity of thought is the velocity of the spirit. (p. 203)

A spirit can occupy a space larger than the volume of a human body, but it can also occupy a much smaller space, even as small as one cubic centimeter. (p. 206)

—Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica in Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives

There can be no trust without vulnerability.

—Weston Noble in closing words to the 2011 Westminster Conducting Institute

The same experience shared by two people presents the possibility of yielding two different perspectives, especially regarding musical experiences. James Whitbourn and I have been friends now for several years. During that time we have had many conversations not only on musical matters of the moment, but also on broader issues involved with ensemble singing. We have met on the common ground of his music, where a conductor tries to explore the sounds contained in those scores. We have often discussed things that make for not only a great performance, but also an honest one. For me and the ensembles I have had the privilege of conducting, those shared experiences have been extraordinarily rich, I feel, because somehow we listen to what each of us feels and thinks, and through that process, we make attempts to bring the notes off of the page. For me, collaborations are the things that energize me and, I think, the ensembles I conduct—or at least I hope so. Someone early in my career gave me the sage advice that I should have frequent collaborations because they both invigorate and provide a sharpened sense of what is possible. In the early years of my career, I happened upon one William Payn at Bucknell. We talked about music and literature, and frequently joined our choirs together in musical collaborations that are unforgettable. I shared similar experiences with William Trego and Nancianne Parrella and the Princeton High School Choir. Collaborations with composers William Duckworth and Jackson Hill were my first forays into birthing new works for composers. Later, preparing my ensembles for work with Norman Dello Joio and William Schuman provided additional journeys.

So I do have a history of wanting this synergy and appreciating its benefits. My collaborations with James Whitbourn have brought me and the choirs I conduct to consider many things because we care so deeply about the time we share together. This book is our attempt to share with you, the reader, a topic that we have discussed, explored, and puzzled over these past years, sometimes because we wanted to discuss it and other times because its absence was affecting the music we were trying to experience.

Since this book is a collaboration of sorts, the contributors have written what they believe, and we have made no attempt to coordinate the content in an effort to remain true to each individual’s voice. So as you read this book, we would like to prepare you for the changing voices between chapters. My chapters are written from my experience, and James Whitbourn’s chapters are written through his eyes and ears. It is our hope that by the end of the book you will discover for yourself the common ground in our shared experiences and be able to apply those perspectives in your musicing.¹

Several of my chapters present to you other shared experiences that have given me valuable insight regarding this trust thing. Elaine Brown, Donald Sheehan, and Weston Noble have been collaborators of word, thought, and living action who have contributed much to what I do, so I have included chapters relating to them to make a strong case to each of you to welcome collaborations into your artistic life. I worry about artists who learn from a teacher and then just do what they have learned from a trusted teacher. From my experience, teaching an artist is a very different experience from collaborating with an artist. Both experiences are very rich, but collaborations are the things that force us to grow our roots downward—very deeply. Collaborations can be frightening (for the reasons discussed in this book); you must at some level trust your collaborators and be willing to take their lead rather than your own. You must also be open to taking another direction that may be foreign and new to you. As someone once described, you must have the necessary artistic guts—to move in a direction that may be a bit uncomfortable for you.

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1 The author uses the coined term musicing to represent the complex creative process involved with sounding music. The term is intended to describe a multi-dimensional process in making music, which is both technical and spiritual. The reader should think of creating music as a multi-dimensional experience.

Prologue

James Whitbourn

There are many kinds of collaboration. From the perspective of a composer, the greater part of whose output is choral or vocal, I am used to different kinds of collaboration between librettist and composer. Sometimes the collaboration is intense and demands a detailed, two-way dialogue stretching over many months. (Benjamin Britten, when writing his operas, liked his librettists to live with him in Aldburgh for the duration of the creative process.) Sometimes the collaboration is a simple conversation or phone call, after which each collaborator does their bit. Other times, of course, the librettist is no longer alive and there is no collaboration at all except through an empathy of thought.

In the early days of my career as a self-employed musician, I held the belief that I could collaborate with anyone. This would certainly be a neat asset and a help towards many potentially interesting projects. Much though I wanted this to be so, I gradually realized that it simply was not true. A collaboration, I found, demanded something particular in the relationship between the collaborators and was not something that could be turned on and off at will.

This book is a collaboration between two musicians who have found an association on many levels. Not all collaborations demand friendship, but this one happens to have that. James Jordan and I have written our chapters independently, and so they read as what he calls a kaleidoscope of ideas rather than as a single thought process. But they derive from many common experiences, and from many common thoughts and understandings about music. James is a musician whose work and presence moves and energizes me, and for whom choral music is not just an interest or a profession, but a way of life. It amuses me that on several occasions when James has met me at the airport at the end of a long trans-Atlantic flight, his first words after an initial embrace (and I am not looking or feeling my best at this point) are something along the lines of So, just wait till you hear this tenor line. I’m really excited by their sound right now. In all my professional life, I have liked to work with people who combine the essential qualities of both the professional and the amateur. By this, I mean someone who has all the skills and requirements of a top professional but who also gives more, and who does so (in the literal sense) as an amateur—someone who does something for love. James Jordan is one of those people, and that is part of the connection that exists between us.

In his chapters, James asks some probing questions about connecting with another musician that caused me to wonder about the relationship between connection and trust. I believe they are different, even if they are related.

A connection, I believe, is something that happens through instinct. It occurs either on first meeting or during a conversation in which two musicians discover a common ground and click in their approach and aims. I have never really found any logic to this mysterious quality. I could name several musicians for whom I have the utmost respect and admiration, and whose work I follow and listen to, but with whom—for some reason—I just do not connect. With others, it happens immediately, even when our respective work is only half known.

But trust is something different. Trust is based not on instinct but on knowledge, and is built over time. It is not a mere gift, but something that has to be worked at. Trust can be built on a foundation of a connection, but it can also be built with barely any connection at all. Connection is about recognizing a common direction, and trust is about recognizing the validity and integrity of a particular individual. As such, I believe different parts of our creative self are activated by connection and by trust. They bring about different types of collaboration—either to create something together or else to understand and express things together.

Occasionally, we are blessed with meetings where there is both connection and trust—or, better still, both of those and friendship, too. When these meetings happen, they are relationships that are valued above all. It has taken me time to realize just how rare these real meetings of mind are, and as time goes on, I value them all the more. My association with James Jordan is one that meets this description, and it has, even in a relatively few years, already produced many beautiful and interesting collaborations. But although our association fits within these rare parameters, the study contained within this book is in no way limited to that kind of relationship. If it were, our music making would lack the breadth that is a normal part of most musicians’ lives. If we had to satisfy so many requirements before working together or making music together, most projects would never get off the ground at all. But for me, trust stands out as the must have requirement for any great collaborative endeavor, and in some ways it is at its most potent when found in a situation where connection and friendship are not present.

Curiously, trust can itself be the basis of a connection. I have been especially touched when I have seen people from different communities with whom there is no connection—or with whom there is even cultural, linguistic, or political divide or enmity—begin to make music together. There have been times when the realization of musicality has resulted in a musical trust that has flown in the face of all their other common experiences but which has resulted in a remarkable connection that both have valued. Even if, after the music making, they go their separate ways and return to their respective communities, both go away changed, knowing that it is even possible to trust the enemy. That realization makes so many things possible.

Preface

James Jordan

The alchemists taught that the wet, sludgy stuff lying at the bottom of the vessel needs to be heated in order to generate some evaporation, sublimation, and condensation. The thick stuff of life sometimes needs to be distilled before it can be explored with imagination. This kind of sublimating is not the defensive flight