Excellence

With apologies to Molly Gebrian, the author of the book I’m about to recommend, but what with the cover image and the subtitle about neuroscience my own brain seems irrevocably committed to making her name into a subject-relevant anagram.

TL;DR: Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician's Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing is an excellent book, and you should read it.

Molly Gebrian is a viola player who also spent a lot of her student years studying neuroscience, and has since spent her professional life finding useful practical applications for that extra study to help herself, her students, and now the rest of us too. She presents clear explanations of what’s going on in our brains during various aspects of the learning process, and works through the implications for how we can use our practice time most effectively.

Today’s title is a question that emerged during an MD’s meet-up at LABBS Convention in October. It emerged partly in the context of familiar tensions within a chorus between those whose main motivation was to work hard and improve and those who were primarily interested in chorus as a source of social and emotional support. But it also existed as a stand-alone question: if singers were getting feedback from audience members that their performances were enjoyable, they felt satisfied with their achievements and rather resented being asked to develop further.

I guess the first stage in addressing the question is to step back and articulate exactly why those who do want the chorus to improve feel that way. It’s not that they don’t also value social and emotional support, but they also get a sense of reward from taking on challenges. They feel the need to aspire to something to keep engaged; maintaining (at whatever level that may be) gives them diminishing returns.

Another one here that emerges from a series of conversations with people in different parts of my musical life. ‘Performance-readiness’ sounds like it should be a relatively easy thing to define, but my observation is that there are wildly different views on what people take it mean in practice.

So at one extreme there is the position that a piece needs to be highly polished before it is fit to be shared with others. And, while in many ways I like the commitment to high standards this view implies, in practice it often serves as a procrastination tactic. ‘I’m not ready yet, I need to practice more,’ is a way of avoiding the risks inherent in a performing situation by hiding behind an activity that you’re never going to be judged harshly for wanting to undertake. Doing more practice is always a Good Thing, and so can usefully be deployed to deflect criticism for holding back from performance.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about the balance between being uncompromising with one’s standards, and about when to let things slide. I’ve been having a number of conversations with people about this, and have also (possibly as a consequence) been particularly aware of it as a question in my own praxis.

Clearly, holding people (including oneself) to a level that you know they can achieve is key to maintaining and developing performance standards. Jim Clancy puts transforming good things that you do sometimes into things you do all the time at the heart of excellence; John Bertalot writes about choral rehearsing as being like pushing a man up a greasy pole.

The final plenary session at January’s LABBS/BABS Directors Weekend was led by Theo Hicks on the topic, ‘Philosophies of Musical Enjoyment: Listening for the Singers’ Joy’. It produced lots of things I wanted to reflect on, and because I kept getting them tangled up I have been procrastinating trying to organise my notes. But a recent conversation with another director who wasn’t there had me wanting to refer to it and so it’s time to try and untangle the thoughts to render them shareable.

The first thing to note the effect that having that title on the schedule had on the weekend’s overall agenda. It put the word ‘joy’ into our common lexicon in all kinds of contexts before any of us know exactly what Theo was going to talk about.

Chorus champions Cheshire Chord Company: with thanks to LABBS social media for the pic

Last weekend took me to Harrogate to spend the weekend with my friends from the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers. Apart from a short stint of contest MCing on the Saturday I was free of duties, so could focus on collecting hugs and listening to people sing, and the quality of both types of experience was of notably high quality.

One of the biggest challenges that novice choral directors face is learning how to listen to the singers at the same time as directing them. It sounds so simple, written like that, and is clearly fundamental to the conductor’s task, but as people new to the activity invariably discover, it is easier said than done.

You see, we each only have the one brain each. And if that brain needs to pay a lot of attention to unfamiliar motor skills in the context of complex musical content, it doesn’t have very many cognitive resources left over to dedicate to the sound coming into it. As one acquires experience, the raw panic of overwhelm subsides, but the challenge remains. There is a lot going on when you conduct a choir – all those people singing at once, each with their specific musical and personal needs - and we still have only the one brain with which to process it all.

When I sat down to write today, I thought I was going to be using the title ‘the problem with cleaning’ to reflect on the way that the process of cleaning can have the effect of raising your standards of cleanliness, such that the job is never done. It’s not simply that it’s only when you’ve removed the film of dust over everything that you can see the stain on the carpet clearly. It’s that as you give it attention, you just keep noticing more that needs cleaning.

But as I started to write, the thoughts felt awfully familiar, and the search function reveals that I reflected on this experience as a metaphor for rehearsing back in 2011. (I should add that today isn’t the first time since then I’ve done any dusting.)