Conducting

The benefits for a choral director of not mouthing the words are something that I have explored on several occasions in this blog over the years. Let's assume for now that we've covered those points well enough to make the point; I'll append a list of those previous posts at the end here* for anyone who's not seen them yet. For today, our question is the perfectly reasonable one of what to do instead.

It was asked by a conductor I worked with recently who found himself at something of a loss about how to use his face once he stopped mouthing the words. My first thought when he said this, I have to say, was admiration and delight that he had taken the advice seriously and acted upon it rather than the more usual response of making cogent arguments about why it is hard to do so. My second thought was that it's a good question, and one that other directors who grapple with this element of technical control might also be interested in, and thus a prime candidate for a blog post.

Justin Doyle's rather elegant illustrations of pattern

I spent Saturday up in Newcastle teaching conducting with Justin Doyle for the Association of British Choral Directors. This was the first of four full days, each a month apart, that makes up the abcd Initial Course. The course is very well established, though this is the first time it has run in this location and with this team. (The Newcastle course will also feature Martin Cook and Keith Orrell in future sessions.)

Regular readers will know that I like to think about the way the structure of events affects the learning experience, and there are several specific features of this course to reflect on in this context.

Harmony InSpires is a chorus with a special place in my heart, as they were the first group I coached - and therefore the subjects of my first blog post about coaching - after starting this website in 2008. Back then they had recently taken on their new name, and, though rapidly growing, were still a small chorus. They have continued to grow in both number and confidence, and it was lovely to see both some familiar faces on the risers, and lots of new recruits.

This was my first visit since their current director, Peter Cookson took over a couple of years ago, and he had asked me to come along to wear two specific, but distinct, coaching hats. One was my arranger’s hat, to work with them on a chart they commissioned last year, and are now just at that mostly-know-it-but-still-making-decisions-about-delivery stage. This is the perfect time for coaching on questions of shaping, trajectory, and overall intent, before anything gets too practised in.

After my day with Silver Lining last Saturday, I headed off down to Bristol on the Sunday for another day with Bristol A Cappella. This time we were in a different venue again, but still in the same area, and yet again it was one I had walked past pretty much every day of my undergraduate life without ever stepping inside. I can report that Bristol Grammar School has a nicely-equipped drama studio.

Turn-out on this occasion was a bit lower than anticipated, which meant that the singers who were there had to work rather harder than usual. The challenge in these circumstances is both musical (the safety net that usually rescues you if you make a mistake is sparser, so you have to do more for both yourself and your fellows) and also as a consequence psychological (you feel more exposed and thus less confident). The very sonic envelope around you is smaller, you feel less cuddled by the music.

So, my generalised musings on this concept brought me, as such musings so often seem to do, to wonder about the dynamic between a director and their choir. Given that the conductor’s job is to bring a collection of individuals together so that they operate musically as a single, coordinated, entity, how do they leave those individuals with a sense of their own agency?

This is not a new question, either to this blog or my wider writings - it is in many ways the question that Mike Brewer and I addressed in the Cambridge Companion to Choral Music through the metaphor of the social contract. But it is always worth a fresh view, especially when you have a useful conceptual lens like locus of control to examine it through.

I am going to look through this lens at two different levels of magnification - first at the big picture of a director’s overall approach to decision making, then in finer detail at the specifics of what we do during the flow of rehearsal.

I have been thinking again recently about the concept of the ‘locus of control’, something I have mentioned every so often in this blog, but not mused about at length for some time. This is the idea that how you experience and interpret events is strongly shaped by where you attribute causation. If you believe that you make things happen, you have an internal locus of control; if you believe that things happen to you, your locus of control is external.

So I guess the first thing to note is why it is desirable to have an internal rather than external locus of control. On one hand, it affects how you feel about things: the sense that what you do makes a difference makes you feel more purposeful, less passive. You feel more optimistic about the future if you don’t feel like the victim of circumstance. On the other, it affects what you can achieve. Not everything we attempt is destined to succeed, but if we go in with the mindset that we can shape our own destinies, we are more likely to attempt things more often and to persevere longer in the face of obstacles.

Only chance to take pics was at the start, so this doesn't include the people bringing the last riser!Sunday took me down to Bristol for the first of three day-long sessions planned for the first half of this year with Bristol A Cappella. Whilst my last visit took to me into a building I had walked past many times as a student and never entered, this one took me into a building that has been built since I left. But it’s right next door to the Wills Memorial Building in which I spent so much of my time in those days, so that combination of familiarity and strangeness I remarked on last time was considerably amplified!

Bristol A Cappella are currently gearing up to their first experience with contest. They have entered a festival in March, which is in part a warm-up run before the UK’s first mixed barbershop chorus contest to be held in May.

These thoughts initially arose in response to working with the participants on the Association of British Choral Directors’ Initial Conducting Course at the weekend. But as I mulled on them on my way home I realised that, while there are ways in which that social context amplified the issue, it’s a general one for choral directors in real life. When I describe the form of behaviour I mean, you’ll recognise it.

So, this is what I was seeing: a conductor stands up in front of the singers they are about to direct, and in various verbal and non-verbal ways, they put themselves and their work down. They soften and lower their posture, and drop their gaze. They describe the activity they’re about to lead as a ‘little’ warm-up or ‘a bit of an exercise’. They express hope that it will work, and apologise for tiny stumbles that would otherwise not have been noticed.

(I say ‘they’; it may be ‘we’. I’m going to have to watch myself here.)