Excellence

The Yerkes-Dodson curveA recurrent theme in my posts on singing and adrenaline over the past year has been the Yerkes-Dodson curve, which shows us how the varying levels of engagement of the sympathetic nervous system affect our performance. The problems people report with things such as shortness of breath or a dry mouth or getting the shakes come not from the existence of adrenaline in the system, but simply from an excess. Some adrenaline is necessary if we are to do anything well, so the trick then becomes to manage our preparation so that the extra burst we get at the start of a performance lifts us into the sweet zone rather than tipping us over beyond it.

Part of this preparation happens immediately before the performance, and relates to how we may warm up differently for a performance compared to a regular rehearsal in order to manage this.

Do you ever have one of those penny-drop moments when you suddenly realise that something you have learned recently might actually explain something else that you know from experience to be true but had never previously really understood?

I had one of these recently about the way that it takes performing a piece to cement it. It is a robust generalisation based in observed experience that however much you might practise a piece of music, it is the act of performance that moves it up to the next level. I have tended to think of the cycle of rehearsal and performance in terms of the metaphor of tempering steel: repeated heating and quenching is what makes it strong.

I recently found myself leafing through a book called The Time Paradox that explores the question of people’s relationships with past, present and future. These relationships seem to consist of a combination of attention (is your imagination always leaping ahead to plans and projects yet to come, or wallowing in events that have already happened?), and emotional orientation (do you focus on the positive or negative aspects of the time you’re paying attention to?).

Lots of interesting stuff in there, of which possibly the most important for practical purposes is the typical profile of happy and well-adjusted people. This involves a strong orientation towards the positive past (traditions, happy memories, as opposed to regrets), and a reasonably strong orientation to both the hedonistic present (pleasure, living in the moment, as opposed to the fatalistic present in which you feel no control over your life) and to the future. They also have some useful lists of things to do to strengthen your connection with any of these if you’re out of balance.

It's a well-documented feature of the creative life that the biggest obstacles to productivity are internal. You know you should get on with the work, you want - in principle - to get on with the work, but in practice, you don't. You check your email, you eat a bowl of cereal, you do the hoovering.* Mark Forster refers to this active procrastination as resistance.

Another well-documented feature of creativity is what Sally Holloway calls 'background processing'. You work at something for a period of time, and get stuck. Then, later the solution to your problem will magically appear when you're out for a walk, or cooking, or just waking up. The inner recesses of your brain continue to work on things between your conscious sessions focused upon it. If you prefer a more organic, rather than computer-based metaphor for this process, I also think of it sometimes in ruminant terms - the conscious effort is the process of chewing the cud, then you send it down to your brain's second stomach for digestion between times.

A central concept of sports psychology is ‘self-talk’ – the internal dialogue people have with themselves about what they’re doing. The content and tone of this self-talk, and the ways people account for their successes and failures has a major impact on how effectively they develop their skills and how successfully they put them into practice when it really counts.

Everybody working on a complex skill will experience a mix of achievement and disappointment. But people often hold quite different beliefs about the two. If you tell yourself that triumphs are temporary and local, but your weaknesses are permanent and systemic, it will be very hard to get any better. But if you tell yourself that accomplishment is the normal state of affairs, with collapses as aberrations, you are going to be both more motivated to address the problems as you believe you can fix them.

In summary:
Success = normal-positive, negative-fluke

Whilst writing my recent post on making your breath last a whole phrase, I suddenly realised I had developed an opinion on something I had previously felt quite mildly about. This is the practice of 'choral breathing'. By this I mean the technique whereby individuals can manage their own breath within the choral sound, most succinctly summarised by the instruction, 'You can breathe wherever you like, so long as I don't hear you'. The object is to preserve the integrity of the overall musical flow as perceived by the audience.

There are a number technical elements choristers need to master to make this happen. First, you need to stagger your breathing with your neighbours so you don't all take your sneaky cheat top-up breaths at the same time. Second, you need to resist the temptation to breathe in the obvious mid-phrase points. Third, you need to avoid closing word sounds early to breathe - so you need to learn to take your breath when your mouth is open on a vowel.

It is absurd to expect a group of amateur singers, two-thirds of whom have never sung together before (and some of whom have not sung since they left school), to learn a four-part close-harmony arrangement from scratch in less than three hours, isn't it? And you wouldn't necessarily expect them to keep the tonal centre rock steady throughout, would you? And it would certainly be too much to expect them to perform it from memory at the end of the afternoon, yes?

There is often a moment in the days before one of the workshops that Magenta periodically offers for our local Moseley Festival, that I too think this is impossible.

Choir directors sometimes find it a bit of an uphill battle to persuade all their singers that they really need to be there for the warm-up. This is a subject I’ve talked about before, but a recent experience shed a particularly vivid light on it. If one person comes late for the warm-up, the difference it makes is perceptible, but the warm-up is still effective. If nobody is there for a warm-up, everyone suddenly realises what it is they have missed.

The occasion was a concert Magenta had been asked to perform in, at which there would be no facilities to warm up. The organisers apologised, but explained, not unreasonably, that their budget didn’t run to hiring extra rooms. Nonetheless, it was a gig we wanted to do for all kinds of reasons to do with relationship-building and good karma.