Has anyone noticed that the height at which musicians hold their guitars has a direct correlation to the level of hardcore-ness in the music?
Think about it for moment. At the one end of the scale - the scale being both vertical and musical - (and not the sort you get in exams, idiot!) we have country and western/folk/hillbilly guitarists, who either place said fretted instrument on their knee via a footstool, or at least have it pretty close to their chin whilst crooning about farming and how they'd rather you didn't mention Taylor Swift. Classical guitarists tend to follow the same formula in Bach and Brouwer.
Next we have the average middle-of-the-road pop guitarist. As these somewhat shy and secretive creatures tend to be session musicians in a backing band, they prefer the rear of the stage where it's darker. Thus, the guitar is held in an uncontroversial middle axis position.
Finally, the bottom end of the chart, in more ways than one, is occupied by the rock guitarist. Despite being rebellious and non-conformist, rock music has many rules and conventions, one of which is that any fretted instrument must be held as low as possible. Presumably this enables the rock musician greater slouching ability and thus to be more 'badass'.
How does this translate to other instruments, namely acoustic non-fretted ones? Obviously many musicians have no choice as to what height they hold their instruments. If you're a clarinetist there's not really a great deal of quibble on whether part of the instrument goes in your mouth or not. (In fact by the logic as explained above, observing a schalltrichter auf! marking in Mahler or Strauss actually makes you less hardcore because the instrument is held higher...right? It's the exception that proves the rule). String players theoretically could hold their violin or viola lower down on their chest, baroque-style, whilst cellists can just not use the spike. But it's all still a bit arbitrary as the argument goes.
However, after some thought, I realised there is one non-guitar instrument on which it is quite possible to play genuinely low to the floor and thus be genuinely hardcore on. And I'll bet you can't guess what it is in the next three minutes.
Time's up - it's the pipe organ.
Let me explain, for the benefit of non-organists. Organs, unless they're very small and weedy, have at least two keyboards ('manuals') and often three or more. These are, for obvious reason stacked on on top of each other in a gently raked fashion to enable the player to switch effortlessly (less so in my case) between them. All these keyboards have names which we don't really need to discuss, suffice to say that the lowest one is known as the Choir Organ because it's got quieter stops for accompanying the choir. (Since my church no longer has a choir, this function is somewhat moot). And it's really, genuinely low down, practically on the organist's lap, which puts it in pretty much the same vertical territory as the hardcore metal guitarist's instrument. Move over, Matt Bellamy.
1 comment:
"Choir organ" on English instruments may, in fact, be a corruption of "Chair organ" - so called because the "Chair" division hung over the edge of the balcony rail. Sitting at the organ console, the player would be facing the main organ, with the Chair division directly behind the organ bench (i.e., "chair").
Regardless, the Chair division would still have been the logical division for accompaniment, both because it contains softer stops and because it speaks into the quire (meaning that it can be heard clearly by the singers and more faintly by the congregation).
In any case - I like this thesis a lot.
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