Choral

The Solving Circle is a technique that William Glasser developed in his work as a relationship counsellor. It is designed to get people out of that impasse where they are both complaining about each other’s behaviours and throwing blame about for the ill-feeling generated by their attempts to control each other. I am interested to see if it offers a useful model through which to conceptualise the choral rehearsal.

The principle of the Solving Circle is to create a space for the safe negotiation of differences. In Glasser’s formulation of marital therapy, there are three entities within the circle: the two spouses and the marriage itself. The ground rule for stepping into the circle is that, whilst you may each have strongly-held positions based on your individual needs, by stepping into the circle you agree that the marriage takes precedence over those individual needs.

Having outlined the basic principles of William Glasser’s Choice Theory in my first post on the subject, I’d like to explore, in this one and the next, two key concepts that he uses in his analytical and therapeutic toolkit. Today’s is the notion of a person’s ‘Quality World’. This is the internal picture each person maintains of what they believe to represent the best way to satisfy their basic needs.

Glasser divides the content of this personal world into three categories:

(1) the people we most want to be with, (2) the things we most want to own or experience, and (3) the ideas or systems of belief that govern much of our behavior.

This is a post written for a particular set of people whom I’d like to help, arising out of a specific form of language I heard in their midst on a particular occasion. But it could have been written for all kinds of other people on different days - it is a very normal turn of phrase. So I’m sharing with the world to help anyone else who finds themselves using it.

Self-talk refers to the language we use to process our own experience of doing something (in our context, making music, though it applies also to all kinds of other skilled activities). It can refer to either the directed, purposeful instructions we give ourselves as we do it, or to the ways we process and frame our experience as we reflect on it. Hence, our choice of vocabulary for our self-talk has a significant impact on how we go about deploying our skills, and how we feel about ourselves as we do it.

The bit of self-talk we are going to focus on today is starting a sentence, ‘I struggle with...’ The project is to replace it with the phrase, ‘I would like to be better at...’

I recently read William Glasser’s book Choice Theory at the suggestion of a friend, and it has been a thought-provoking exercise. There is a good deal in the book that is open to critique - to the extent that if I didn’t trust the judgement of the person who recommended it, I may not have bothered to finish it - but there is also a good deal of humane and sensible advice in it.

So, I’m glad I did persist with it, and I’m prepared likewise to cautiously recommend it in turn, with the caveat that you need to be able to cope with an argument that quite often overstates its case and makes unsubstantiated (indeed, unsubstantiatable) assertions. If you’re not sure you want to cope with that kind of thing, here’s a summary of what I learned from it...

I mentioned recently an email with a couple of good, nitty-gritty questions about conducting technique. Having looked last time at how to wean an inexperienced choir onto needing only a single prep beat to come in on an anacrusis, today we’re onto a more complex conducting task:

How do you conduct something such as Gibbons Short Service, where there is no consistent number of beats to the bar?

This is an interesting question, as the available approaches are inflected by somewhat conflicting questions of technique, pragmatism and musical context.

I know conductors who would see the correct answer as: you change your conducting pattern every bar to give the right number of beats. And, whilst this is a sensible answer in that it will make sense to modern musicians accustomed to modern barring and modern beat patterns, I’m not sure it’s the most helpful answer to someone facing this challenge for the first time.

I recently received an email from a conductor I worked with earlier in the year with two really good questions. They thing I liked about them was that they were at one level nitty-gritty practical questions about the detail of what you do with your choir, and at another opened out into general principles with a much wider applicability than the specific technical instance he was asking about. Perfect blog-post material.

Here’s one of them:

Bringing in a less able group on an up beat has been problematic. Would you advise sticking to the proper method, and educating them, or take the line of least resistance and give them a down beat "for nothing"?

See what I mean? I’ll start with talking through the step-by-step process I’d use in this situation, then explain some of the thinking behind it, and then finish with some thoughts on the ‘line of least resistance’ dynamic, which pops up in so many different circumstances.

During the abcd Initial Conducting Course I led earlier this year, I had several conversations with conductors about how to manage rehearsal planning in the particular circumstance that you don’t yet know the much about the choir you’re planning for. How do you work out what will be appropriate repertoire when you don’t yet know the skills and experience of the singers you will be working with?

This is a circumstance that can affect anyone who is lined up with a conducting job they’ve not yet started, but it is felt most strongly in early career musicians who don’t yet have a fund of previous similar experiences to draw on.

So, the first thing is to do what profiling you can. For those moving to new teaching jobs, the age of the children you will be working with gives you quite a lot of information about what to expect, and you can also glean a good deal from what kind of repertoire your predecessor was using with them. If they have any recordings of recent performances, this will also tell you a lot.

I had an interesting question from a conductor recently that struck me as one to reflect on in this blog. It is intensely practical - the kind of issue that choirs and conductors the world over are grappling with all the time - but also demands some depth of thought, as it is as much about the human as the musical dimensions of choral singing.

Here goes:

The church choir where I am a part-time conductor is ageing. To address this, my fellow part-time conductor started a children's choir a couple of years back, and in that time quite a number of children – more girls than boys – have been choristers, though depressingly few have stayed for long.

I'm sure this is a common phenomenon, largely born of the wider choice of activities and attractions available to children ("...compared to my day!") Apart from the perceived lack of staying power, though, what strikes me is how little noise they do make when joining the adults to sing in a service. Any thoughts on how that can be addressed?

See what I mean? Anyone involved in choral music will have immediate empathy; we know this scenario.