Conducting

I had a note recently from a conductor of a community band about his dilemma of whether he should continue working with them. I say 'note' - it was actually a lengthy reflection on the situation as it has developed over the decade he has been working with them. So I can only summarise here. But I think I can pull out the key points, and they are questions that face many musicians at various points in their lives, so worth mulling over together.

So the situation, in brief, is this. During his tenure, there are significant ways in which he feels he has succeeded: the band's performance standard is better, they are tackling more interesting and/or more ambitious music, and membership is up.

But he is worried that this process has also involved a degree of loss of some of the qualities that he valued on first acquaintance with the band: musical leadership and organisational management are more top-down these days, with the players seeming less in involved in things like suggesting music or finding gigs. He is worried that people are having less fun - there's less laughter in rehearsal, less buzz, less vibrancy.

In my recent post about the nature of conductor-choir attention, I was focusing primarily on the flow of information between director and singers. How if the conductor is thinking about ‘depicting’ the music to the choir more than they are noticing how the choir is (how they sound, how they look), then that limits their opportunity to adapt in real time to the needs of the emerging music.

It occurred to me as I was finishing that post that there’s also a technical factor at play here. I noted that you can tell when a director is really listening hard, from their body language - the whole posture and gesture space becomes more integrated, more connected, visually ‘quieter’. A director looks at their best, that is, when they are not thinking about how they look, but instead about how their choir sounds.

Circles of involvement: increasing levels of engagement as you head inwardsIn my last post on this subject, we had got as far as feeling sympathy for people who don't volunteer for jobs to keep the choir running, as part of an understandable desire to husband one's energies and attention. Now we need to figure out how inveigle them into making the effort.

I should add that one of the reasons I am finding this a valuable subject to write about is because it is one that doesn't come naturally to me. I have phrased it as 'daring' to delegate, because my first instinct has tended to be to hope people won't mind my asking. I am much better at this than I used to be, but I still feel like this is a work in progress in my own life. So I am writing to consolidate and develop what I have learned as much as to help those who find themselves in similar situations. But then, you knew already that's why I keep a blog, right? It's not just for you...

Our goal, then, is to create a culture of volunteering, that encourages people to move inwards on our diagram of involvement. It is worth revisiting Kotter's model of organisational change here, as this is a classic case where you need something to build urgency to motivate the change before the transformation can happen.

I was in an online conversation recently with a director who is very new in post. She was asking advice about a particular administrative task, and my contribution to the debate (since other people had already helped out with useful advice on the specific question) was to suggest it was something she could usefully delegate. She wasn't going to be short of things to do without this task, after all.

Her reply was one of those that I knew choral directors across the globe would empathise with:

I do appear to have taken on a great deal of other jobs as a job lot, but on the other hand haven't asked if anyone else would volunteer, so will bring this up at this week's rehearsal or at the first committee meeting (or music team meeting). Is it your experience that smaller choruses find it more difficult to field jobs out or is it the usual scenario of 'ask a busy person' regardless of the size of membership? A good proportion of members are in the 'elderly' section and I know, are not too keen to take on any responsibility. Committee and music team meetings appear to have been very few and far between so am working on making these more regular, at least until I get more of a 'feel' for the position and its commitments/what I feel comfortable delegating!

One of the truisms in choral conducting is the importance of eye contact. When being coached myself, I have been given exercises such making sure I look round at every individual, with the chorus instruction to raise their hands if they feel lacking in director attention. And as a coach, I have spent time with other directors intervening in habits such as dropping the gaze just before bringing the singers in.

At the same time, though, I have to note that some of the best sounds I have heard directors elicit from their singers - the most unified, in tune, resonant - have come when the director was not making eye contact, but was instead listening intently.

Action shot from the coaching session

Sunday saw the second of the days I have led for the chorus directors of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers. Like last year's, we had around 90 delegates, but this year we had expanded the team of facilitators and presenters to make it even more of an extravaganza. The thinking behind this is that one of the primary challenges in developing this programme is giving the membership access to the wonderful resource of each other's experience, while still giving everyone the chance to feel like a delegate who is being educated and not only a presenter who is helping others.

The session that was the most rewarding from my perspective was also one of the shortest (this wasn't the reason!). We had billed it as 'show and tell', as it show-cased the association's most successful director, Sally McLean who directed the assembled delegates while I gave a commentary highlighting aspects of her technique to note.

Karen O'ConnorI spent all day Thursday at a workshop on applications of sports psychology to musical performance, run by performance coach Karen O'Connor. Karen started out as an oboist (she played with the CBSO for many years), and I knew her when I worked at the Birmingham Conservatoire, where her work with students on mental skills for performance was widely admired

I am sure that knowing of her work has encouraged my own investigations into such things as adrenaline, self-talk and NLP, and it was a delight to hear her present her work, rather than learning about it piecemeal by hearsay. The ideas involved a pleasing mix of things that resonated with my current praxis, and concepts/approaches that were new to me, and the discussions between the delegates added a rich range of different perspectives on them and possibilities for their application. I would highly recommend the day to anyone involved in facilitating performance.

I recently spent a morning working with the director and assistant director of a choir on a variety of elements of both vocal and conducting techniques. It was an interesting session for all kinds of reasons, not least the resonances between the work on their own voices and the work on how they will help others’ voices with their gestures.

We spent the first part of the conducting work using the principle that you can hear what kind of effect your gestures will have on a choir by listening to how they affect your own voice. Singing a simple 5-note scale to a conducted 4-pattern, for example, gives a very immediate and clear indication of where that pattern facilitates legato and where it is bumping. Down-beats in particular are a challenge to combine the clarity needed for accurate rhythm and a synchronised performance with the continuity that voices need to flow at their best.