What is the point of singing?
Is it to communicate something to others in an emotionally committed and heightened way?
Is it to engage in the intellectual exercise of deciphering code?
Is it to avoid error?
Many choirs hold sheet music (pieces of paper with code printed on them) in their hands when they sing. And over decades and centuries, a culture has developed whereby the choir singer can end up feeling that their first (and perhaps only) duty is to avoid error when trying to decipher this code.
There are many possible reasons why this idea has taken root. A lot of responsibility rests with generations of choral directors who felt their job was to identify and correct errors made by their singers. Also involved is the culture of internal censure within the choir - those disapproving looks that come down the line from the person in the section who is considered to be the most “musical” (which often means “the person most proficient at deciphering the code that music comes packaged in”).
This leads to the “singing-as-sudoku” fallacy, by which I mean that a choir rehearsal is akin to two hours sitting in an armchair working on a particularly knotty sudoku, and often with the same body position!
I am not saying we shouldn’t strive to get the notes right. The composer chose those notes (and the rests in between them), and we are not respecting their musical vision if we don’t try to sing what they wrote. But code written on bits of paper is not music, and the deciphering of that code is not being musical.
The singer’s job is to take the code in front of them, and bring it to life. An actor does this with a script. They take code known as “writing”, and breathe life into it. The words of Shakespeare only come alive when an actor speaks them. Music only comes alive when we sing the notes, and if we are in a choir, we are singing those notes with others. Then something magical can happen, if we let it… Our inherent human desire to communicate with others can lead us to add all the things the composer didn’t write down. The inflection. The colour. The nuance. We take the code, and we make it human again. We make it live again. That is being musical, and we can all do it, because we are all human. The job of the choral conductor is to try to remove all the barriers that stand in the way of the singers bringing their expressive powers to bear, to turn the code they are holding in their hands back into living, breathing music.