Conducting

I had a rich and fascinating evening working with Cleeve Harmony near Cheltenham on Tuesday. This is a new barbershop chorus, only 10 months old, and while its membership profile is very typical in its mix of people with previous experience and people new to singing, it is striking for having only one member - its founder-director, Donna Whitehouse - with any previous barbershop experience.

My remit for the evening was primarily to help them with director-chorus communication - working with Donna on aspects of her technique, and working with the chorus on making sense of what she's doing. One of the rewarding things about such an agenda is the sense that whichever end of the equation you address, you also help the other.

We all know that listening is central to ensemble music - the participants listening to each other, and in bigger ensembles, the director listening to the whole. And if you asked any member of an ensemble if they were listening, they would reply that of course they were. But equally there may be all sorts of stuff that's going on that they're not hearing. Why is this?

• They may be focusing so carefully on their own part that everything else is shunted to the very edge of their attention. Another, involuntary, version of this is when a dose of adrenaline induces tunnel hearing
• They may have got so used to how the ensemble sounds that they have ceased to notice things that could be improved. Persistent tuning or synchronisation errors are often in this category. Combine these first two experiences, and you start to grow some flaming pink hippos
• They may not have the perceptual categories to identify an issue, or their scale of perception is not sufficiently fine-grained to make the distinction.

I spent Wednesday evening in Coventry with the Belles of Three Spires, working both with the chorus and with their directors. Well, that's always the case of course, but our focus was sometimes on changing what the singers did to improve the performance, and sometimes on the person out front.

Read almost any book on conducting, and you will find some comment about how the director's communication and expressiveness comes not only from their conducting gestures, but from their whole demeanour: their face, their stance, their way of being in the world. (That includes my book, I should add.)

Now, both Belles director Lucy and her assistant Lindsey are expressive musicians who clearly have a full-body experience of music. So I didn't need to tell them this. Actually, what we found ourselves doing was concentrating the musical attention more closely into the gestures.

In one of the comments to my recent post on becoming a director, Lynne alluded to that sense of 'not feeling like a proper director'. I am sure lots of other people will sympathise with her - either feeling like that now, or having felt like that in the past - and I thought it was worth spending a little time to reflect on that experience, why it happens, and what we can do about it.

The feeling that you're in a position that is not entirely deserved, that you are winging it by the seat of your pants, and the fear that you will be found out has a name. It is called 'Impostor Syndrome', and it is quite well documented in all kinds of professional scenarios. It helps, I feel, simply to know this is normal.

Not everybody falls into the role of a director through random circumstance. Some people aspire to it in advance. If you are singing away in the middle of your choir, thinking, 'it looks fun out there, I'd like to do that one day', this post is about the kinds of things you can usefully do to prepare so you are in a better position to start when opportunity comes a-knocking.

This is the first of two posts that emerge in response to conversations at the recent LABBS Directors Day about the process of becoming a director. This one focuses on the experiences and needs of people who find themselves parachuted into the role without much warning; the next one considers what you might do to prepare to ready yourself for the role some time in the future.

I hope that for those people who found themselves becoming directors when they thought they were just going along to help out it was a comfort to discover how normal this is. While for the individual concerned it is definite shock to the system, sometimes involving a life-changing degree of overwhelm, as a route into the role, it is very common.

Saturday took me over to Coventry to work with Silver Lining chorus. I have visited them a number of times over the years, though not for a while, and they have developed considerably since my last visit - both in size and assurance. Their director, Sara Jackson, had sent me a to-do list of things it might be useful to work on, with the proviso that if I identified something I felt was more important or urgent, that could queue-jump.

The way this played out in practice was that I went in with some specific plans for coaching tactics right from the get-go, and was then able to diagnose and start to address other coaching needs from within those activities. It felt like an efficient way of working.

The delegates in songSunday saw 95 chorus directors, assistant directors and directors-in-waiting from the Ladies Association of Barbershop Singers convene in Birmingham for the day. That is a lot of people, I should add. We had run a consultation exercise last autumn which not only fed much of the content of the day, but had led us to project an expected attendance of about 70 delegates, and even a month ago that still looked about right.

Don't get me wrong - I was delighted with the huge response to the day. But the last flourish of registrations before the deadline had me worrying over the published programme and whether we had left enough time for the breaks, and how the noise levels were going to be in discussion sessions. One of the great things about working with directors, though, is that they understand such dilemmas and readily cooperate to make the logistics work. We also had the splendid 'sheep dog' skills of Anne Potter, who rounded everyone up regularly to keep us running to time.