version anglaise de l’article “présentation de terrain”. English version of “présentation de terrain”.
This post is inspired by my phd defense presentation, and aims to give a comprehensive overview of my doctoral fieldwork.
Dear listeners
Today, I would like to share with you my PhD research, which I have assembled under the title “the experience of choir singing. An anthropological essay of an artistic technique”.
This work required a few years of ethnographic observation of (and in) the choirs of our region of Lorraine, and the aim was to understand choir singing, as an experience, meaning, seizing the human point of view of this practice, and understanding the pleasure of individuals who engage in this leisure activity. Following John Dewey (1934), we consider that understanding art starts with understanding the pleasure of ordinary people and their way of interacting with artistic and cultural productions.
Art experience, and particularly choir singing, being broad, I chose to learn what people might say about they own practice by conducting interviews with amateur singers (8), professional singers and choir conductors ( (7). I also wanted to describe types of organizations of the activity and the musical practice itself.
Regarding methods, this perspective, lead us to use primarily qualitative research tools, such as biographic interviews, and interact with choir singers, so as to describe the artistic sociability and musical practice. The chosen observation scale, a region, enables us to re-territorialize the investigation, revealing artistic cooperation between people and collective organizations (for example, associations, music schools or concerts halls). Our region of Lorraine has the chance of holding more than 530 choirs, 232 middle school choir (which are part of a national education program), primary school choirs, church choirs, and a few social housing choirs.
I would like to do my presentation in four steps:
- First, let us talk about the origin of the research question and how the investigation process
- Secondly, we shall observe the method principles sustaining this work
- Thirdly: results of this research. The immersion in choir singing will tell us something about the specific artistic sociability around choir singing and amateur activities in general
- And at last, some results about making music together, compromise and sociability
How it went: origin of the research question
My aim was to conduct a field work based on “thick description”, an ethnographic concept forged by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in 1973. This perspective considers culture as a sum of significations carried by individuals and in which they evolve. The role of the observer is to interpret situations and social interactions to understand this culture. Leasure is not only a cultural practice it is also an experience. It is something that brings people together and in which people engage themselves.
Field work, and thus my own participation in these activities, enabled me to develop a collection of choir singing situations, from the most individual to the most collective (such as individual singing lessons, choir rehearsals and regional events with a couple hundred singers).
This research has its origins in my masters degree. At that time, following a course in socio-anthropology in Metz, I went looking for a field to do some field work. A couple months earlier, I had entered a choir. I therefore worked together my own discovery of choir singing and my integration in this group as a field work. When I started this investigation, I was also reading books about sociology of culture, we had classes about pragmatic approaches (particularly those developed by Antoine Hennion about music, 1988). It appeared clearly to me that I could use those methods to start this new field work, about amateur musical practice. I started using ethnographic observation to figure out what I could encounter in the field.
I started with the Maîtrise of Metz’s Cathedral, analyzing its local rooting and how a structure like this one, whose name refers to music school in the time before French Revolution, adapted to today’s audience, and pursued this investigation to the practice of choir singing in the region, questioning the local construction of the experience of choir singing. My music education enabled me to engage in the activity and understand what was at stake: on the first hand because I had taken music class as a child (which this being said, is also an element to study regarding family education strategies and gender socialization), and on the second hand, because education is part of the practice itself ! You learn about the activity in the process of engaging in it, and while engaging in it along side other people in a group. It’s a process. That is something I got to experience myself: sociability and engaging in musical activities enables people to interact and get familiar with musical knowledge and techniques.
These interactions and socialization brought an interrogation about differences between professional practice and amateur practice, around the concept of “expertise”. Things we categorize as being professional or amateur make sens in daily life and refer to two different participation frames (Daniel Cefaï : 2012) : the frame of work, and the frame of leasure. Leasure, meaning outside of working hours and motivated by the sake of pleasure. Regarding competence and knowledge, the field work soon presents intermediary figures with amateurs who are not beginners, and professionals who practice choir conducting in the frame of another job (thinking of teachers asked to supervise a school choir with little to no experience at conducting, therefore in a different work situation as a professional conductors). Most choir conductors are volunteers; some amateur singers might have a musicology degree and might be experienced musical analysts. This intermediary figures raised awareness about the circulation of knowledge among individuals.
Method
To understand an experience, the observer needs to engage in it. The main method sustaining this research is participant observation, a classical ethnographic method since the pioneer work of Bronislaw Malinowski (1922). This method requires engaging with the observed community. But, instead of participant observation, I followed Florence Weber (2009) who refers to it as “shared experience”, more suitable for a close field work and points out that the observer takes part in the observed group. The observer is also a social actor who shares an experience along side other individuals, engages in the activity, and has a role. People in the choir new I was doing a doctoral research, but for them I was also, and more often, an alto 1 or soprano 2. I was also a student of some the interviewed singers.
Being part of a community was also a benefit for interviews with people I didn’t know very well, like the choir conducting teacher, or the high school music teacher. Being part of a singing group helps other people to “locate” me inside this community, and give them hints that I understand what they are telling me, with the use of common references.
It also seemed necessary at some time to try a different point of view. Therefore the use of available statistics and media information, which led to cartography.
To organize observations, I used tools of symbolic interactionism, particularly those who enable to talk about framing. First: the service relationship (Goffman: 1961), service relationship refers to the interaction between an ordinary user and a professional. The archetype of service relationship is the relation between a doctor and his patient, or a lawyer and his client, or a garage owner and a car driver seeking advice. Therefore, a singing teacher and his student. This modelization which bring us back to the problem of expertise, previously mentioned. In these situations, a professional gives some counsel to address a client’s issue, and therefore will share his expertise. In the end, the client will also learn an information during the interaction. We can see how this concept of service relationship describes the situation of a singing teacher helping a student and sharing knowledge about vocal techniques, or when choir singers await their conductor to sing together.
But this isn’t a one way relationship. To describe this dynamic, of framing a group activity, Howard Becker used the term of “domestication”. This was in the context of a conference he gave in 2009 in Metz, analyzing a situation where a group of archaeologists recruited volunteers to collect artifacts in some field work. The archaeologist have a scientific method to conduct field work, that the volunteers might not know, being not familiar with this field of expertise. The archaeologists frame the volunteer’s activities and teach them some methods. The term of “domestication” was used in the sense this reverse relationship service, where the professionals need the volunteers, and guide them to act the “wright way”.
In musical interactions, there was often a two way interaction where amateurs, students ask for advice and seek lessons, and where professionals guide volunteers activities to bring them to some result that they want.
Results
In the end, the field work which aims was to understand choir practice, will show us several things. The choir is a place, it is somewhere people go to meet other people and to sing. Choir is also a social actor, reunited under a name, and often some official status as an independent association. A collective actor, capable of organizing activity (concerts) and which reunites people around shared goals. Choir is therefore also a place of sociability. It’s a place of interaction and artistic cooperation, on many levels.
1/ the sound of the choir is more than the addition of the individual voices. When people sing together, they listen to one and other (interact), to build a collective sound. Choir singing is a collective action
2/ cooperation mechanism explain why beginners can also fit in a choir and find a place to practice music with little background: the internal dynamic of the group, and collective nature of choir singing, means that beginners can find support in the collective effort, and sing along.
3/ musical practice itself is made of adjustments and interactions. In a rehearsal, choir singers will often stop singing and talk, or the conductor will talk, asking to repeat a phrase with a different nuance, or to correct a mistake. Singing, making pauses to talk and adjust, repeat the process until the group made some progress, and settle to a suitable interpretation of the music they are rehearsing. History of music and analytic knowledge becomes an intellectual equipment in these interactions: a change of nuance may be required to fit some musical conventions. There is experiment, adjustment, interactions to build artistic quality.
Artistic quality or efficiency, is always pursued. In other words, it “has to work” to please participants and audiences, in any sort of production, even those ou would place a social or educational goal before the performance. The success and pleasure brings the possibility to share a aesthetic experience together, with the singers, the audience, and sustains, if necessary, the quality of the whole process and of the participants.
Compromise and negotiation
Quality and efficiency are always present, but are relative to other elements. This will allow us to talk about different kinds of goals some choirs may have, leading to different uses, and experiences of choir singing. Some of the encountered groups may confront us to tensions, or compromises between oriented goals they might have.
For example, a tension between “civic” and “industrial” goals, such as described by Boltansky and Thevenot in 1991. These authors studied arguments, and especially the type of arguments people refer to, to evaluate situations and discriminate wright from wrong. They classified these arguments into virtual “cities” according to a certain distribution of ideals and goals. The “civic city” values cooperation, collective work, equity and people’s dignity; the “industrial city” values performance, organization, technique.
Certain children choirs for example, adapted to the educational system and build like a school program. A school teacher told me, speaking about “cham” (these are music class integrated in the public school system, with a partnership with a public music school): “it has to work / you got to keep things moving”, meaning not all students were suited for this class where a certain performance (actually not even an musical performance, but scholar performance) was expected. This class was meant to students who could keep up with their homework, while attending to 5 extra hours of class for the music lessons. This is a selection mechanism. The tension here, resides with in the expectation of performance, selectivity on one hand, and an ideal of education affordable for everybody, because these classes were free of charge for the participants, and its integration in public schools. One might see here the result of “protected school trajectories” (Agnes Van Zanten) in public school by strategic parents who can’t afford private schools.
In another of these children choir on the contrary, a girl with special needs was accepted in the choir, despite poor school results. In this situation, equity and dignity took over performance, because this was the only class where the child could fit in and showed some investment (the conductor noticed that this girl was always on time for the music class, with all her music sheets ready). School performance was nevertheless a criteria for the other children. Many of the encountered choirs were dealing with compromises within their organization, choosing what seems best for the group and for the participants.
Sociability
The diversity of choir singing is linked to diverse type of experience and diverse type of pleasure given by this experience: artistic, aesthetic, technique, or the need for belonging to a social group, sharing with others, or discovering new things, such a new music, new place, new knowledge about oneself. These elements can be found in any experience in a various amounts. The seek of pleasure and its gratification my lead to long term engagement, along side with the group dynamic, meaning once you are part of a group, you develop a sense of belonging and loyalty. One might pursue things they like, and reengage. On the contrary, deception can lead to a change of activity. People evaluate situations, concerts and their own participant according to pleasure. People also like to share what their experience, talk about it, or lead other people into it. For example, among the interviewed singers, there was Anne Marie, a devoted and passionate singer who was also a school teacher and regularly sings with the children in her class. She also convinced her grandmother to join the choir. This is a situation of “counter gift” as described by Marcel Mauss (1934). Counter gift also partly illustrates the cooption mechanism of choir recruitment. People bring people into it.
Sociability can’t be reduced to “social capital”: it is not only the amount of people an individual might know, it is also interactions, links and the way these links are made. Sociability is establishing link with other individuals. In some cases the choir can directly be an answer to a need of social interaction (in our field work, we encountered Veronique and Jacques who joined a choir to make friends in a new town) or result of the activity and be a positive side effect. Meeting other choirs, singers, orchestras and traveling was a great part of the experience among choirs we met.
Artistic sociability brings people together who would not have met otherwise, regarding their professional occupation, residency or economic status. It contributes to the circulation of people, of musical knowledge, repertoires, and techniques inside a local art world. Regarding this aspect, we could ask to what extend to artistic leisure activities contribute to cultural democratization. A kind of cultural democratization, which originates from society and relies on voluntary participation of people.
Limitations and perspectives
This research relies on several years of participant observation in choirs, and I focused mostly on people’s experiences and musical practice at stake. Despite this field work, this work cannot be considered exhaustive. Here are elements of continuity.
One of them being the family transmission of music and children leasure activities. These are subjects partly treated in the interviews when singers remember their childhood, or teacher talking about their adult and children students, without being the topic of a specific chapter. Family is a place of socialization and transmission. The framing of children leasure activities can be part of educational strategies or gender socialization. Works by Sylvie Octobre (2010) and Catherine Monnot (2012) show the choice of music instruments contributes to the socialization of girls. On this topic, choir singing seems different because it is less chosen by families (when they have ambition for their children, they don’t choose choir singing), and more often the resultat of discussion between children and parents wishes. Sometimes, children discover the choir in their school and then share it with their family or in children movies. This was the case with Anne-Marie, now a primary school teacher, who started a passion for choir singing with the movie “Les choristes” in 2004, and since convinced her grandmother to sing with her in the choir.
These are also parameters to be considered, when we ask about musical taste as musical construct, or about children cultural choices.
The professionalization of choir conductors encountered during field work enables us to talk about skills and expertise. The observation of amateur musicians has shown us that ordinary individuals can be familiar with artistic techniques or knowledge of which professionalism don’t have a monopole. On the other hand, professionals, seeking recognition, will claim skills and expertise, which justify employment and career paths. As conducting music often means doing some teaching, it apprears also that professionalization of choir practice contributes to enabling choirs to renew their musical repertoire and skills
Finally, the diversity of forms of singing techniques is vast. Some of them are not yet discussed in my research, such as beatboxing, soudnpainting, which also appear in choirs ; or what we call in French “chant sign”, which is the way hearing impaired people engage in singing
Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to answer any further questions,
Metz, 22nd June 2021