Choral

How to hear your choir more perceptively is a theme I have explored before, both in its own right and in relation to elements of conducting technique such as stillness and mouthing the words. And my recent visit to the White Rosettes, with its opportunity to observe how a director can listen the music into tune, came at just the right moment for me to try and frame how these thoughts fit together as part of a practical guide to expressive gesture.

The issue is one of attention. If you’re entirely focused on your projection of the musical soundtrack inside your head, that will be too loud for you to really hear or respond to much of what is coming back to you from the choir. (You get the same issue with instrumentalists of course - often the issue going on behind a spirited but technially splashy and/or sketchy performance.)

Third in a series that starts here

The fluid interplay between Simon Halsey's speech-accompanying and conducting gestures was a fascinating case study in the research that feeds this post

The very term ‘expressive gesture’ encapsulates the idea of musical thought made physical. And it is an interesting question as to how this happens. Often in conducting manuals, you get lots of useful detail on technique such as the conventions for indicating musical structures such as metre, but notions of creating musical beauty are sealed off in a box marked ‘Magic: do not open’.

To an extent, this is not as much of a cop-out as it may seem. Spontaneous, speech-accompanying gesture is something we all do intuitively as part of the act of thinking and communicating, without needing to be taught how to do it. And musicotopographic gestures (i.e. those than emerge as part of the act of thinking in music) are equally spontaneous and intuitive. This is why I argued that the most important first step in developing expressive gesture was to develop the musical imagination.

My previous two posts on this theme considered the scenario of a young, skilled musician taking on the role of director for the first time with an established choir, and, respectively, the challenges they are likely to face, and the advantages they are likely to wield. This last post in the series looks a bit wider to the dangers the category ‘young and talented’ presents to those it is applied to in general, as well as how this plays out the specific scenario of the new director.

Talent, as I have discussed before, is a mythological category. Our culture largely regards it as an inborn, innate quality, an assumption for which the literature on expertise can find no basis. Depth of skill emerges from the quantity and quality of practise someone undertakes; capacity follows rather than precedes the activity.

But, because the mythology of talent is so ubiquitous, people still use it to describe the facts of aptitude that they observe. Henry Kingsbury describes how it thus becomes a socially-negotiated label: those with authority bestow it upon junior members of that social world, giving them permission to consider themselves as particularly and specially endowed. This label can then prove a useful motivator for continued engagement: a child who is led to believe they have a special capacity for something is arguably less likely to give it up.

Okay, so this is a huge topic, but I am going to see if I can keep focused on the specific thoughts that prompted me to write on the subject. These ideas arise from a combination of having read some of the scholarly literature, plus the practical experience of working with real people. So, I’d say they’re quite well-informed and well-grounded, but not comprehensive. I reserve the right, as ever, to revise them as I continue to learn.

It is a reasonably common question that choral directors come up with to ask how to help a member of their group who can’t match pitch. They will typically have worked with them at an individual level at some length, and continued difficulties lead them to seek advice from their peers.

Now, it strikes me that ‘matching pitch’ in the sense of being able to sing back a note heard from the piano is quite an abstract skill. And that whilst it may look to be the simple building block upon which successful participation in a choir is to be built, I suspect it is actually a more sophisticated level of activity that relies experience gained in more ‘real-life’ and less ‘laboratory’ musical situations.

Having picked over some of the hurdles that face the sprightly new director when they take up their first post with an older choir in my last post, it occurred to me that there are also some advantages to this situation that it is worth pointing out. It may seem redundant to tell someone why they are fortunate to be both youthful and skilled, but when you are struggling against the twin obstacles of inexperience and condescension, it doesn’t necessarily feel as enviable as outsiders assume.

But there is a specific advantage that any new director has, and which is amplified significantly by both the qualities of relative youth and high skill. Your very existence bounces people out of their comfort zones.

There’s a scenario that happens frequently enough that it is possible to generalise about: a well-established choir acquiring a ‘young and talented’, but relatively inexperienced director. I put the ‘young and talented’ in scare quotes, as that’s how the director is usually described by the choir, but may not be how I would put it.

The dimension of youth is generally quite clear (though possibly not quite as purely objective as you might think - the perception of juniority can be magnified or diminished by other factors such as gender and class). But the concept of ‘talent’, as regular readers will know, is open to critique - it is a concept that mythologises the products of dedication as innate rather than hard-won.

In my previous post on this subject, I was mulling over the phenomenon of reduced attendance at rehearsals taken by an assistant rather than front-line director. I had got as far as analysing it as a side-effect of the director’s function in creating charismatic encounters. It’s not that the assistants are not inspiring and compelling as people, it’s that it is the role itself of director that confers the power to galvanise.

We had got as far as starting to think about the routinization of charisma when the post got too long, so that’s where we’re starting today.

To recap the theory: Weber’s classic formulation of charismatic authority, upon which pretty much all sociological studies in this area build, saw it as an essentially volatile social relationship, born in situations of crisis, outside and indeed often in opposition to, more stable forms of authority (such as the traditional or bureaucratic). Later studies have observed that, whilst this inherent instability is often apparent in charismatic groups, some organisations manage to sustain themselves for considerable lengths of time.

I was recently in one of those conversations in which somebody is worried about an experience, and wonders if it’s entirely their fault, or whether other people have the same problem, and I realised it is an incredibly common issue that I’d not really seen discussed anywhere before. So I hope the other people in that conversation don’t mind me sharing with a wider audience, because it is common across all kinds of choirs, and having the conversation on a wider scale could well be useful to others who are going through the same thing.

The issue is this: on the rehearsal when the director is away and their assistant standing in, attendance drops significantly.

Now, the assistant obviously feels this keenly. It does feel like people are voting with their feet and are telling you that you aren’t worth getting off the sofa for. But it’s not just the assistant who feels it. It is irksome for the director, who not unreasonably hoped to be able to carry on from where everyone had got to in their absence, but instead has to go back and support people who are catching up from missing a week. It also dampens the spirits of the people who do make the effort to turn up.