Excellence

Sunday saw my final, and longest, visit to the Red Rosettes before they fly off to Ireland to participate in this year’s IABS Convention. Having seen them in May, and then a month ago, it was cheering to be able to tell them that I could hear their progress from each visit to the next. This is what you’d hope would happen, of course, but it’s not always perceptible to the people plugging away week in week out.

At this stage of proceedings, it is of course far too late to mess with the general game plan. Whilst I usually describe my role as to go around messing with people’s heads, it’s also one of my life’s goals to increase people’s confidence, and making late changes to performances is a good way to have the opposite effect. So, apart from focusing in on a few isolated technical details that would benefit from specific attention, the day’s activities focused on taking a well-shaped and well-prepared performance, and making it more vivid.

Wednesday evening took me up to Preston for another visit to the Red Rosettes. It is less than six weeks now until they head over to Ireland for the IABS Convention, and so are starting to gear themselves up to contest rather earlier in the year than they would normally for the rhythm of the British women’s barbershop year.

Many choruses find the summer the slow season, as people’s holidays keep attendance down over a period of 6-8 weeks. Indeed, many choral groups deal with this by taking a break over the summer, though this is rarer in barbershop world, where the performance seasons are regulated by events that are not particularly tied in to school terms.

So, out of a series of specific musical and technical tasks for the evening arose a bigger task of connecting back with the Red Rosettes as they are at peak performance, to put this slow season behind them for their convention preparation.

I had an email this week from a quartet I worked with last year asking for any tips or advice for preparing for competition. They have about 6 rehearsals to go, so this was a great time to ask. I’m answering the question in terms of preparing for any ‘big’ performance, where ‘big’ refers not to length of set (contest performances, after all, tend to brevity), but to the emotional importance of the occasion, and how long it has been anticipated.

(I’m leaving aside for today the question about whether people should consider competitions important. Not all contests matter to the same extent after all, and different groups will care to different levels. Let’s just accept that the one in question is important for this quartet, for all kinds of reasons, of which a competitive spirit is only one.)

So, things it is good to do include:

There’s been a certain amount of heat coming from under collars in the musical world over the last few days over reports of research that showed that judges in piano competitions appear to be using visual information more than aural in picking winners.

Or, to be more precise, people asked to second-guess judges in piano competitions got the same answers much more reliably by watching silent videos than by either audio alone or video+audio clips. Which isn’t precisely the same thing, but the research sounds like it is robustly enough constructed that one can reasonably draw that conclusion.

Now, the heat has come in the rather predictable form of fulminations about:

• Young performers getting promoted on glamour rather than ability
• How shallow and dumbed down everything is getting with all this focus on visual things instead of the Music Itself
• How nobody ever listens properly any more

Which is interesting in all kinds of ways, not least that all these points, except possibly the last one, are at best tangential if not completely irrelevant to the research. But they do help reveal why the research is proving so disturbing.

I spent a very happy day last month at the English Schools Athletics Association championships in Birmingham. We went because a family member was competing for his county, and since it was on our doorstep we could go along to support him, but once there we made a day of it, and I found myself learning quite a lot about performance psychology.

The thing about sports at this level - i.e. the best in the country, but not yet fully mature - is that you see a lot of technically very able performances, but the mental and emotional control displayed by professional athletes is not yet fully developed. It makes you realise how much high-level achievement is governed not only by what someone can achieve, but also what they will allow themselves to achieve.

The Bournemouth International Centre: The scene of my introduction to barbershopThe weekend saw the British Association of Barbershop Singers back in Bournemouth for their annual convention. This was a bit of a nostalgia-fest for me, as it was the venue of my first ever barbershop convention in 1996, and we were even staying in the same hotel as we did back then. And of course, on the first really beautiful weekend of the year after a cold winter and late-starting spring, the logical thing to do is to go to the seaside - and then spend most of the day in halls with no natural light.

The first big story of the weekend was the way that younger quartets dominated the contest, taking four of the six spots in the final, and two of the medals. Only two of these were strictly speaking 'youth quartets' as defined for contest purposes, but new champion quartet The Emerald Guard included three faces who first made their mark in British barbershop through the Youth Quartet Contest, and the other three - The QuarteTones, Taglines and current youth champs, Park Street - are all associated with university barbershop groups.

The importance of challenge has been a recurrent theme in my reflections over the years both on what makes us happy, and what makes us better at what we do. A recent conversation with a friend brought into focus for me an interesting dimension to this: that it is not so much the objective level of achievement that determines our sense of an activity being rewarding, but the extent to which we feel we are growing through it.

Maybe this is obvious, but I found it worth stopping to think about for a moment.

The conversation was about that decision that we all periodically have to make to discontinue a commitment. My friend had found herself taking on more and more activities - as interesting people are prone to do - to a level that had been sustainable when she was in a job she was familiar with, but was just too much when she took on a new role. What was interesting was that the ensemble she chose to resign from was the one that (a) she had been performing with for the longest time and (b) operates at the highest level of all her current activities.

Scott Dorsey, over on ChoralNet, has a nice blog post about the usefulness of having a fresh pair of ears in your rehearsal room. I liked it not only because he promotes the kinds of services I offer (!) but also because it got me thinking about breadth and depth of perception, and how we balance these out.

Scott uses a delightful metaphor coined by a postgraduate class-mate of 'flaming pink hippos' as representing the glaring and obvious problems that you gradually lose the ability to see the closer you get to your work. You get so focused on paying deep attention to one aspect, that you totally fail to notice much more fundamental issues developing elsewhere.