Excellence

I had an email last week from a director who is grappling with two interrelated issues that I am sure will resonate with a lot of my readers:

• Singers who have signed up to perform at an event dropping out as the event gets closer
• Singers texting him before rehearsals with apologies during the time he is trying to get 'into the zone'

In both cases, the problem he identified - rather perceptively I thought - was the effect on his mood. He feels frustrated by these actions, and demotivated. He recognises that this response doesn't help his chorus, and so is looking for ways to manage his own emotions.

When I first started teaching, I was very focused on the content of lectures, on what I was going to say. In my second year, when I had more of a handle on this, my attention migrated to how the students were getting on with it. By the third year, I became increasingly obsessed with levels of warmth and oxygen in the room.

Similarly, in preparation for performance situations, like many people, my attention starts off on the content - in musical contexts, learning the notes and words, in comedic ones, developing the material. Until I've got a grip on the what, I don't have very much attention available for the how.

But I have also seen performances where the performer is far more focused on the act of performing, of connecting with an audience than on the content. The technique/material was quite ordinary, even mediocre, but the audience feels good about it because the performer is really focused on making them feel good.

Years ago, Jonathan and I took some ballroom dancing classes. It was fun it its way, but the classes weren't very good because we were simply taught a set sequence of steps for each dance without any guidance on how you would vary them in different circumstances. So we could never quick-step in a room smaller than the one we learned in, for instance, because we'd have hit the wall before we got to the turn.

I am reminded of this sometimes when working with amateur singers who have learned their music by a rote method such as learning tracks. They may have a strong and accurate grasp of the notes (the big benefit of this approach), but they lack the mental flexibility to hold the music in their heads and change their performance of it at the same time.

Something that all musicians have to cope with, whether in their individual practice or working with ensembles, is fixing passages that 'always go wrong' (sometimes with the addendum, 'however much we practise them'). There are two issues to deal with here, neither of which can be fixed in isolation:

• the ingrained pattern of actions that routinely pull the music off-piste
• the negative emotional response associated with this moment - what Oliver Burkeman has called the 'psychological flinch', or 'ugh response'.

I was back in Ruislip on Wednesday for my second coaching visit in quick succession to Capital Connection. We were continuing with the skills agendas we had started last time, but - given the time of year - we did so via Christmas repertoire.

It is a commonplace in groups that maintain a performing repertoire that the skill level you had when you first learn a piece tends to get embedded in the performance of that piece. And it can be hard, therefore, to develop the performance as the skill level improves. Sometimes the reason why music gets dropped from repertoire is less about the song itself than about shedding the traces of past habits that it still contains.

Christmas repertoire gives a strange variant on this process. You start in on rehearsing it each autumn for a relatively intensive period, perform it quite a lot, and then put it to one side for the next 9 months or so. When you come back to it, it gives you a snap-shot of where you were the previous year.

I spent Saturday in Peterborough with Rhapsody Chorus for what turned out to be an intensive coaching session. Part of the challenge was from working on music that was as yet very fresh in preparation, so the singers were working harder all day than they would with more familiar repertoire. At the same time, the very freshness meant we weren't having to try and move beyond any particularly ingrained habits, so the distance travelled was commensurately greater.

A theme that emerged several times during the day, and then reappeared in our debrief session at the end was that the place where effective work takes place is at the edge of your current ability. If you can do something comfortably, it's having a nice time singing (which isn't itself a band thing to do!) but you're not particularly learning anything. The things you need to spend rehearsal times on are the things that you can't quite do yet, but you can get close enough that you know a few more tries will get you there.

The new convention venueThe weekend saw the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers assemble at the Telford International Centre for their 36th Annual Convention. This was the first convention at this venue and, while in some ways it wasn't ideal (such as the limited availability of hotel space in walking distance), it did provide a very kind and honest stage for the singers to perform on. All the ensembles sounded like they were able to produce what they had prepared there without distraction and everyone I spoke to confirmed they had experienced it as a good performance environment. The team running the sound system deserve to feel very pleased with their work over the weekend.

The conducting literature has a somewhat uncertain relationship with the concept of charisma. It is a quality that is in many ways central to the maestro myth, but actual conductors writing about their craft show a degree of mistrust about it. Charisma can be seen to be tricksy, manipulative, or a worrying tendency to 'believe your own bullshit'.*

There are three elements in particular that quite reasonably arouse mistrust:

• The hijacking of the executive function: one of the more disturbing studies on the neurology of charisma showed how, when people believe they are in the presence of a charismatic leader, they suppress the use of their critical faculties in a manner akin to hypnosis
• The potential for tyranny: the need for strong top-down control to keep the emotional energies in charismatic groups from breaking the group apart concentrates a lot of power in the leader’s hands
• Charisma’s inherently expansionist agenda: charismatic groups are inherently proselytising - they set themselves up against the mainstream, and then seek converts. They are not, therefore, necessarily very comfortable neighbours