Excellence

A friend of mine was telling me recently how she and her co-director had re-stacked their chorus using a method of assessing each singer’s voice for its type of resonance, and using that to determine placement. She remarked how quite a few of the singers were really quite agitated about the part in the process where they had to sing alone to be assessed – even though it was only ‘happy birthday’, and done in private, not in front of everyone else. Still, they felt the process was worth it when the restacked chorus sounded significantly better than before.

Now, the thing about this kind of story is that it’s supposed to be about the value of the stacking method, but you can’t help wondering how much of the improved sound is actually a result of the process. That little dose of adrenaline the singers got from their fear of singing alone will have shunted them up the Yerkes-Dodson curve to a state of enhanced performance, whilst the steps taken to keep the process not too scary will have prevented them over-shooting into counter-productive anxiety.

In stand-up comedy, there are two schools of thought about the use of the stage. One is that you should keep moving as that forces people into maintaining attention - they can't drift off because they won't know exactly where you'll be when they look up again. The other is that you should stand still, as that is a position of power on the stage.

In conducting, there's only really one school of thought. Everyone agrees that getting rid of extraneous movement is the ideal, although every over-active conductor also remarks how hard this is to achieve.

Cleftomania on the small screenSince my post back in February about working with the quartet Cleftomania in Portugal using Skype, I have continued to have regular sessions with them - about once a fortnight up until the Spanish Association of Barbershop Singers convention in April, and once a month since then. As the initial shock to the system of the new medium has receded, and we have slipped into a sense of routine, I have started to notice some rather more subtle idiosyncrasies of the experience and their effect on what we do and how we do it.

Sweet Adelines were back in Birmingham at the weekend for the second year running for their annual convention at Symphony Hall. I commented last year about how the region’s healthy state is clearly audible in the quality of the performances they are producing, but this year’s contests were a clear step up from there.

The quartet contest was hotly contested, with a strong field of well-established quartets and experienced quartet singers dominating the top ten places. Gold medallists Echo, for example, were only in their second year as a quartet, but have the experience of two previous gold medallists within the line-up, while the second and third place quartets, Miss-Demeanour and Fortuity are the 2010 and 2011 LABBS champions respectively.

I spent last Sunday back with my friends in Bristol Fashion, who continue to go from strength to strength. I have been working with them once or twice a year now since 2009 and it is very noticeable that each time I return the skills we worked on during previous visits are always well enough embedded to build upon for the next set of developments.

For example, a couple of years ago, it was a significant challenge for the singers to sustain a line by bubbling. This time, we could take that skill for granted and build on it using a combination of ideas I picked up from Alison Thompson at the LABBS Education Day last week and the Inner Game principle of Will.

So, having considered some of the central elements of people’s stories of how they came to be dedicated to their thing to the point of monomania, it’s time to think about what implications these elements have for us in our roles as teachers and/or choir leaders. There’s no thrill like it for an educator to spark someone into brilliance (both for us and for them), so what can we do maximise our chances?

First, we need to recognise that a lot of it is out of our hands. We can’t force it to happen, since it is essentially about the learner’s decision identify with the activity. Moreover, since there are a limited number of things at which you can be obsessively brilliant at once, it’s clear that not everyone is going to pick my thing to obsess about. That’s fine. That clarifies our job as being (a) to enable cheerful competence for those who are ignited by something else and (b) to be ready to meet the needs of those who fall in love with our thing.

I have been thinking quite a lot recently about what Dan Coyle refers to as ‘ignition’ – the spark that motivates that obsessive, deep engagement with a subject or activity that leads to the development of expertise. Ten thousand hours is a huge amount of time to dedicate to something, and if you only give your attention to it during the formal or dutiful parts of learning you’re not going to clock up enough experience to get beyond mere competence. Going to your lessons and doing your practice isn’t enough: you also need to squander great big chunks of your life on it.

I spent a most interesting and productive evening on Tuesday evening with Hallmark of Harmony in Sheffield. They are in the process of developing a five-year plan for the chorus: they have already identified their four primary goals, and have a working-group assigned to each generating ideas about how they will achieve them. They asked me to come along in advisory role to work with them in profiling development needs for both chorus and musical leadership team.

The plan was, therefore, to meet with their director, Andy Allen, and some of the Music Team before the rehearsal, then to go and spend the first part of the rehearsal observing. They had organised things carefully so that I had opportunities to see all of the team in action. Then, in the second half of the evening, I took on a more orthodox coaching role, working with both the chorus and directors.