December 2012

The title of this post is one of those that would be reasonably opaque unless you are familiar with the argot of barbershop. For a barbershopper, a ‘polecat’ is a standard song that everybody in your world knows the parts to, and therefore suitable singing at any social occasion where you are meeting barbershoppers you don’t normally hang out with.

For people in the Barbershop Harmony Society, the repertoire is defined by the songs published in a set of books entitled the ‘Barber Pole Cat Program’ (and I imagine that’s where the abbreviation derives from). These have traditionally been ‘old songs’ – classic barbershop standards of the type that the founders of the society in the 1930s were nostalgic about from their youth.

Further to my recent thoughts on what Transactional Analysis can teach us about what's going on when the conductor-choir relationship starts going wrong, it's worth having a think about a different way to model the relationships. This is the dramatic triangle developed by Eric Berne's student, Stephen Karpman.

The triangle is an interaction between three roles: the Victim, the Rescuer, and the Persecutor. Sometimes you might get three different parties involved in a relationship, each taking one corner of the triangle; alternatively, you might find two parties taking up two of the roles and casting others who are external to their interaction in the third.

A number of recent conversations with choral directors and singers have had me thinking back to Eric Berne's classic book on Transactional Analysis Games People Play. This is the one that introduces the idea that people interact using a variety of ego states - acting as adults, parents or children - and that by understanding how people are adopting and reacting to these roles, we can break out of cycles of dysfunctional relationships into healthier patterns.

The conversations that have got me thinking about it have been those where people express frustration with each other's attitudes and behaviours. Directors feel that they are working their socks off while their singers are just along for the ride, or singers feel that their directors put a lot of pressure on them. Or, directors feels that their choirs are resistant to change, while their singers feel the directors lack respect for the choir's traditions.

So, I'm starting out by thinking through the kinds of relationships you find between conductors and their ensembles according to this model. What to do about it is the next question, which may have to wait for a follow-up post.

Anyone else who sings something like ‘Gaudete’ from memory at Christmas will be facing Magenta’s annual memory challenge of four verses of Latin. Doesn’t sound so very much in itself, but alongside other challenges like the rest of the seasonal repertoire to commit to heart and a reasonably sprightly tempo, it feels like a bit of a stretch.

So, here’s what we did in a 20-minute blitz to kick-start the process.

First, we assigned each verse a colour: red, green, yellow and blue respectively. We then took each verse in turn, and I asked random singers to give me a number between 1 and 12, which gave an exercise from a pre-prepared list: