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A working majority of the directors present: the ones who didn't quite fit in the pic are also lovely!

On Saturday we held the annual Directors Day for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers. Over the years we have focused increasingly on finding ways to include as much practical, hands-on work for all delegates as possible, as that is a core skills which can only really be developed by doing. This often involves, as it did this year, work in small groups where people take it in turns to direct and sing for each other, facilitated by a coach.

The faculty always meet the night before to road-test our coaching models. This is partly so that we go into the day confident about how they work, and having figured out where the pitfalls may lie and what to do about them. And in fact it often seems as if the very act of contingency planning makes it less likely that our anticipated difficulties arise as we can head them off before they happen. But it’s also so that we get some time to nourish our own praxis, both as directors and as coaches. We learn a lot in these sessions to inform both the coaching that follows the next day and our own week-to-week directing.

This year’s theme was ‘decluttering our gestures’ - that is, exploring how much of what we are currently doing is actually necessary, and finding ways to clear out movements that are not directly useful, in order to increase clarity and reduce distractions. This is a bit like working on breathing as a singer: at whatever stage on your conducting journey you are, it is always worth revisiting. I see myself as a recovering over-director; whilst I can often produce quite efficient and minimal gestures, the possibility of getting distracted into overdoing it is ever present and it is all too easy to lose hard-won discipline if I relax my surveillance.

We had some silly games lined up to explore this, since doing things that make you laugh helps counteract the pressure people put themselves under in these kinds of situations. It also underlines the point that of course it’s a weird and unrealistic scenario, but that’s fine, it’s there for learning, not for replicating our regular conducting experience.

The games were structured to give each conductor feedback in real time about what they were doing. As conductors we primarily focus on what our hands our doing, and may not be fully (or at all!) aware of what other body parts are trying to join in. The point wasn’t to make us rigidly scared to move, but to bring existing movements into conscious awareness.

As bodily movements were identified, the question was always: is this clutter? If it happens occasionally and has a clear relationship with musical content, then it may be a useful part of the furniture. If it happens all the time, then it’s probably a habit rather than a purposeful contributor to the operation. What happens if we remove it?

Nearly always, what happened was that the sound improved. Synchronisation slips are very often the result of different body parts competing for attention, and increasing stability of knees and shoulders routinely improves the integrity of tuning and resonance. Discovering this in a hands-on learning environment is strongly motivating: you make the effort to change something and are immediately rewarded.

This is important because changing what one does habitually is difficult and can feel very strange. One often feels somewhat alienated from one’s sense of self as a musician, which can be very disorienting. If your emotional experience of a song is embodied in a certain way of inhabiting yourself, you may feel as if you are being less expressive.

A moment of significant insight in a group I was coaching came when someone who was experiencing this sense of awkwardness and discomfort from changing their directing style was told, ‘Oh you look so much more relaxed!’ The conductor herself had been feeling anything but relaxed as she concentrated hard on calming down her knees and shoulders, but the stability of posture she thereby achieved was experienced by the singers as helpfully calming. And then of course the turn-taking meant that she too could experience how this feels from a singer’s perspective.

At the end of days like this we like to rummage in the delegates’ heads about what they have learned, and what they want to learn next. It informs our ongoing curriculum planning, and gives a useful moment of reflection for the participants to start organising the various inputs of the day in their heads before Real Life swamps them again. Reading the responses afterwards I was struck that I don’t think I have ever seen such a strong correlation between what we were hoping to teach and what the delegates felt they had learned.