Charisma

In my previous post on this subject, I was mulling over the phenomenon of reduced attendance at rehearsals taken by an assistant rather than front-line director. I had got as far as analysing it as a side-effect of the director’s function in creating charismatic encounters. It’s not that the assistants are not inspiring and compelling as people, it’s that it is the role itself of director that confers the power to galvanise.

We had got as far as starting to think about the routinization of charisma when the post got too long, so that’s where we’re starting today.

To recap the theory: Weber’s classic formulation of charismatic authority, upon which pretty much all sociological studies in this area build, saw it as an essentially volatile social relationship, born in situations of crisis, outside and indeed often in opposition to, more stable forms of authority (such as the traditional or bureaucratic). Later studies have observed that, whilst this inherent instability is often apparent in charismatic groups, some organisations manage to sustain themselves for considerable lengths of time.

I was recently in one of those conversations in which somebody is worried about an experience, and wonders if it’s entirely their fault, or whether other people have the same problem, and I realised it is an incredibly common issue that I’d not really seen discussed anywhere before. So I hope the other people in that conversation don’t mind me sharing with a wider audience, because it is common across all kinds of choirs, and having the conversation on a wider scale could well be useful to others who are going through the same thing.

The issue is this: on the rehearsal when the director is away and their assistant standing in, attendance drops significantly.

Now, the assistant obviously feels this keenly. It does feel like people are voting with their feet and are telling you that you aren’t worth getting off the sofa for. But it’s not just the assistant who feels it. It is irksome for the director, who not unreasonably hoped to be able to carry on from where everyone had got to in their absence, but instead has to go back and support people who are catching up from missing a week. It also dampens the spirits of the people who do make the effort to turn up.

As I left the house on Saturday to attend the West Midlands Green Party Regional Conference, Jonathan asked if I wanted to take the camera. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘This isn’t the kind of event I’ll be blogging about - just too far removed from music.’ I regretted this cavalier assumption about halfway through the afternoon, when it dawned upon me what a wonderful case study of a charismatic organisation was operating around me.

Around this time last year, I had thought the Green Party as rather interesting as an organisation that should be charismatic, but was not. Or possibly, was no longer. My father had been a member back in the 1980s when it was still called The Ecology Party, and as far as I can recall looking back to that era (I was at an age not to pay a great deal of attention to politics), it had what I now recognise as some of the classic hallmarks.

There is an idea I have been wanting to blog about for some time, but I have been getting stuck at the first hurdle. So I have decided to break this down into two parts, and deal first with the bit I’m stuck on, and when that’s out of the way move onto the actual application to ensemble singing in a second post. I’m not pretending it’s going to be an elegant way of presenting the concept, but if you really prefer your writing in formal genres, you probably wouldn’t be here on a blog.

So we will just muddle through as best we can, and I hope in due course to have untangled enough of what I’ve been grappling with to be useful for vocal craft. I was put onto the idea in the first place by a choral director, so it may turn out in the end that I am needlessly complicating things here. Oh well.

My last post was about why it is a problem when a choir starts developing factions. Criticism of one sub-group by another is an early-warning indicator that this might be happening - not least because that articulates the fact that the people doing the criticising are thinking of the others as ‘them’. So, our next question is: what can a director to inhibit such tendencies and to counter them should they appear?

My recent post on the relationship between choral identities and musical behaviours included a passing comment that has stayed with me as deserving more thought. It was the point about people in one section being blamed by those in other sections for musical difficulties experiences by the whole ensemble. This bothered me; it feels like an unhealthy dynamic, with some members of a choir feeding their esteem needs from others’ vocal difficulties. And it’s a dynamic I have encountered often enough that it warrants some reflection on what’s going on, and why it makes me so worried.

So, in the case I cited, it was the basses who were subject to persistent bashing. It could be any part, though - I know of groups in which sopranos or barbershop leads have been subject to the same kind of treatment. Voice parts give an obvious opportunity to create a sense of us-and-them, but other fault-lines open up according to the circumstances of individual groups.

One of the events that got me thinking on my recent trip to the Edinburgh Fringe was the last of a series of lectures about comedy and culture from researchers at Brunel University’s Centre for Comedy Studies and Research. The one we went to was by Leon Hunt, and as well as focusing on the work a particular comedy duo, did some nice analysis of the concept of dark comedy. I do like a spot of theorising, as you know.

The thing that particularly got me thinking was the phrase ‘pushing the envelope’. This is a formulation that gets bandied around a fair bit in comedy, and you also hear it all the time in barbershop’s various debates about style. There are some interesting parallels and differences in the way the phrase gets deployed in these two worlds, and I have been saving the idea up to have a think about. Now I’m home again, it’s time to mull.

Final post in a series that starts here

Self-actualisation is the 'bingo!' of human experience. It's it is when we are feeling most fully ourselves, immersed in meaningful activity that makes a positive contribution to the universe and not only draws on what we are best at, but helps us get even better at it. It's living in that sweet spot where pleasure, challenge and meaning come together.

As such, I confess, it is the type of human need I have been most nervous about writing about. What if I write a fatuous post? I have been wondering; what if I find nothing to say that isn't self-evident and gushing?

Because it is something of a responsibility to feel that other people's peak experiences are in your hands. As choir directors, we mostly deal with this responsibility by not thinking about it too hard and getting on with planning the detail. But every so often, we need to think about this stuff to check that we're fulfilling our obligations to those whose experiences are in our hands.