Curiouser and curiouser

"she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English" (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

In one of Gareth Malone’s programmes where he encourages people to sing who normally wouldn’t, there was a bit where he criticised someone for singing in an American accent. He was working with a talented young man in a school, who he was preparing for a ‘big solo’ in the choir. Gareth was being nice about it, but he took the mickey out of him a bit, impersonating him. Then he showed him how to sing properly, with a ‘normal’ voice, using his own accent. A similar thing happened to my daughter, who is a singer songwriter and was writing songs and singing jazz standards when she was at school. The head of music used to similarly berate her for singing American. I was never quite clear why, but it seemed to be an accepted narrative that this was just not the way to do things properly. It was also clear that the students he most admired were the ones taking classical singing lessons and singing with a ‘trained’ voice. Perhaps it was just musical snobbery, but it wasn’t presented as such. Neither Gareth Malone nor the school teacher had any problem with popular or jazz styles per se, they just seemed to have a problem with the accent.

First of all, I would argue the case for singing songs with an American accent on purely stylistic grounds. If you’re singing songs from the Great American Songbook, or songs in a soul style, if you’ve been listening to a lot of Billy Holiday or Stevie Wonder, then it would be natural to sing in an accent appropriate to the style. I presume neither Gareth Malone nor the music teacher would have had any problem, for example, with singing Puccini in an Italian accent. This also plays, perhaps, into my own chip on the shoulder about being a jazz musician and experiencing snobbery towards this during my own musical education, particularly when studying music at university. I’ll bracket that however, because, well, who cares…

Maybe the problem is with singing in a bad American accent, so that it sounds inauthentic, and that singing with one’s natural accent would be preferable to this. I feel this when I hear Robbie Williams, for example (but I might be alone in this), or even Elton John. I don’t feel it when I hear Laura Marling, who is definitely English, definitely sings with an American accent, and has been embraced as a performer in the US. She even talks with an American accent in at least one song, which is sort of comic, but also makes sense. An English voice would just sound wrong, so it probably felt like the only option. So perhaps if you get the accent right, Gareth would be happy. I don’t think so, but I’d be really interested to know how singing teachers perceive this. I should have asked Joanna Eden.

Doesn’t matter, because none of this is the important bit. Now we come to music therapy. The difference between a music therapist and Gareth Malone, or my daughter’s music teacher, is that a music therapist would first of all accept the song as it came out. They wouldn’t try to correct the accent. Perhaps even more importantly, they would also be curious about it. Why sing the song in this way? What has the client/participant/singer been listening to? What is their musical and personal history? Does the song have a personal significance for them? If they have written the song, what, or who was their inspiration? When they sing in a certain accent, are they thinking of a particular person, a particular recording, do they have a musical hero? Is there someone they want to be like, and does singing make them feel a bit more like this person? When you think about it like this, from, if you like, a ‘clinical’ perspective, then criticising someone’s choice of accent could feel damaging, belittling. It could feel like you’re not really paying attention, but instead seeking your own musical agenda, to get things ‘right’, the way you, and the ‘musical establishment’, want things to be.

In other words, not exploring where the music comes from, what it’s expressing about the person, could be a failure of curiosity. I like the word ‘curious’. It leaves things open. If we were to stop being curious about the client in therapy, we’d have lost our way. This is why the music in music therapy might not always sound how you want it to sound, because the therapist isn’t making any corrections. Instead, they are discovering where the client, and the music, leads us next. This is likely to be somewhere interesting, as long as no-one is adjusting their vowels.