Musical Identity

The recent kerfuffle about conducting and sexism, along with some thought-provoking posts over on the Thoughtful Gestures blog, have reminded me of some thoughts I put together for a lecture last year at a girls' school entitled 'Where Have All the Women Gone?' Having revisited my notes I find there's actually more I might want to write about here than I remembered, but for today I'll stick with Prototype Theory.

This is an idea first developed by psychologist Eleanor Rosch in 1973 to explain one of the fundamental ways we organise our perception of the world into categories. And in each over-arching category, there will be some examples that seem more typical of that category than others. One of her early studies found that there was a considerable consensus that, while hat stands might logically belong to the category of 'furniture' people would think of tables or chairs much more readily as representative of the class.

Like others who blog, I was very torn about whether to comment on the recently-reported comments of Jorma Panula about female conductors. As one friend put it, 'Oh for God's sake. Why do the press even give these dinosaurs the publicity?' There is this fond hope that eventually we will outlive everyone who hangs onto these views and the world will be a more benign place, and in the meantime the kindest thing to do is just ignore them.

But the comments thread that ensued after the Artsjournal article suggests that this fond hope is but a delusion. I have a hunch that women of the 1930s were saying similar things about ageing Victorian relics even as misogyny was on the rise once again. So, sorry folks, but we're going to have to take a look at this. Not at Panula, who, frankly comes over as a caricature of himself, but at the arguments that emerged in the responses on the artsjournal report.

I don't know quite why I started thinking in Freudian terms recently about arranging. I am sceptical in all kind of ways about Freud's theories - so many of them are so phallocentric, after all, which may feel normal for men, but just looks weird from a female perspective. But there are also ways in which he was quite humane and you can't accuse him of having not spent enough time thinking about this stuff.

Anyway, the experience that brought all this to mind was the stage of arranging I think of as 'combing' - getting all the lines lying smoothly so there aren't any tangles in the music to bump the listener, or knots in the lines to impede the singers. And I got to reflecting on how I know when an arrangement is finished.

One small bit of unfinished business from my first post on this subject last month is the question from the director I quoted of whether it is harder to get people to volunteer in a small chorus. It seems like a good question, and my initial hunch is: not necessarily, but there could be some kind of link between choir size and development of infrastructure.

So, first, why 'not necessarily'. Just because your choir is small doesn't mean that the people in it are any less intelligent or willing or up-for-it. Yes, there will be fewer people to do the jobs, but many of the jobs are commensurately smaller, so there is no logical reason why you shouldn't find enough people to get everything done. Indeed, quartets seem to manage all their logistics, music acquisition, coaching needs, publicity and finance with only four of them. Numbers aren't an inherent defining factor here.

In the first two posts in this series, we looked at the problem of ageing choirs (or indeed voluntary organisations in general) and how their difficulties recruiting the next generation of members can be analysed in terms of the routinisation of charisma. We've got to the point of addressing what we can actually do about this.

I should possibly add at this point (maybe I should have done earlier!) that whilst I'm writing these posts in largely theoretical terms, I am mentally testing them out on a whole bunch of real-life case-studies as I go. But I'm not citing these very much, except the odd anonymised anecdote, because I don't think it is the kind of thing where commenting publicly would be kind to the groups involved. We all know groups to whom these comments could apply to a greater or lesser extent - it's not going to help them overcome their challenges to point the finger at them.

More helpful, I hope, are the following points.

Bradley & Pibram's diagram: the dynamics of a charismatic group

In my last post I started the process analysing the problems faced by ageing choirs in terms of the routinization of charisma. If you missed it, the back-story is only a click away; I'll wait here for you to see where we'd got to so far.

All caught up? Right, we were about to look at the group dynamic of a once-charismatic organisation that had settled into a happy and successful mode of operation. For this we are going to revisit Bradley and Pibram's diagram of the relationship between two key elements of a charismatic group: control and flux.

Flux (originally theorised as 'communion') is that sense of euphoric inter-connection where individuals merge their identities into the group. It is generated by certain specific forms of relationship within the group, characterised by each member having access to every other member without exclusionary sub-groups or cliques. Control (originally described as 'power') is the top-down authority that keeps the emotional energy thus generated in check.

This started off as an exploration of the problem of ageing choirs (and indeed choral organisations). There are so many choirs in the UK (and I imagine beyond) that are populated almost entirely by retired folk who are desperate to recruit some young blood to replace those that gradually fall prey to illness or infirmity. But it has developed into a wider analysis that could potentially help choirs that have not yet got to that stage head the problems off at the pass.

It may also get divided into more than one post. I'm not sure at this introductory point how far the ideas will grow.

So, a couple of observations about the ageing choir.

My recent workshop on voice and movement with Zemel Choir and their workshop guests have given me lots of food for reflection. I am very accustomed to using movement and gesture as rehearsal tools, as well as working with groups that use choreographic presentations as a matter of course. I am less accustomed to introducing these elements to a choir that does not have an established history of them, though.

This means that I have had the opportunity to learn lots about people’s reactions and modes of learning when starting from scratch. (There are echoes here of my session with Cleeve Harmony back in October - it is one thing to teach something when people know what they’re after and just want to learn how to do it, it is quite another when you have to help them imagine as well as execute the vision.)