Choral

Seventh post in a series that starts here

In my last post, we considered first the acute, urgent kinds of cognitive needs you meet in rehearsal. These are easy to deal with in that they present their demands very clearly, and recede as soon as you meet them. We then went onto the thornier issue of a low-grade chronic need for more cognitive stimulation and the kinds of dampening effect it has on the atmosphere in rehearsal.

Today's task is to suggest things we can do to cure - or, even better - to prevent a choir getting into this state.

The solution lies in the general principle of good rehearsals that variety keeps attention fresh. Specifically, you want to make sure that you offer plenty of opportunities for people to get involved in thinking things through for themselves rather than perpetually being given instructions to follow. You need to make sure you're giving people the opportunity to generate their own knowledge.

Sixth post in a series that starts here

I first noticed cognitive needs when I was rehearsing a choir and as soon as we finished singing a passage, all the singers dived into little huddles of intense conversation. I drew breath to restore order to the proceedings, and then realised that, at that moment, there was nothing I could say that would matter to them more than their current endeavour of checking notes with each other.

That's where I learned that sometimes the most efficient learning activity in a rehearsal is to let people get on with what they are doing. If the singers are focused and intent on solving their own problems, interrupting them will just slow things down.

Fifth post in a series that starts here

Have you ever met anyone who:

• always bustles into rehearsal 5 minutes late and faffs ostentatiously with their bag and coat and music while everyone else is already getting on with warming up? or who
• repeatedly pipes up during rehearsal with things that need fixing, often at a tangent to the main thing you're working on? (Or the variant: who repeatedly identifies problems in a part other than their own?), or who
• always has just one extra thing to add just when the choir announcements were finishing and thus causes them to over-run? or who
• makes periodic complaints to the committee about decisions the director or other members of the choir leadership have made (repertoire choices, rehearsal strategies, stage wear)?, or who
• won't blend?

If you have, then you have met someone whose esteem needs are showing.

Floddy the Hippo of Belonging: sorry about the camera-shake - it must have been an emotional moment...Fourth post in a series that starts here

After physical survival and safety, our next most primal needs are social. We need to feel connected to others, to feel like we belong.

Fortunately, choirs are good for this. Indeed, the two main reasons people join choirs are (a) 'I'd like to sing, and I might make some friends, and (b) 'I'd like to make some new friends, and it might be fun to sing'. So, we can feel good about what we offer our members on this one.

Having said that, it is possible to feel isolated in a choir. Sometimes new members feel like everyone already knows each other, and it's hard to find a conversation. Choral seating arrangements that keep everyone in rows inhibit you from interacting with each other. (Logistically there may be good reasons for this - the bigger the choir the more urgent are the issues of crowd control after all - but it still has an impact on belonging needs.) Sometimes the people addressing the choir (primarily the director, but also others making announcements) use cultural references that make you feel excluded.

Third post in a series that starts here

After our basic physical needs, the next most primal need we have is to feel safe. It is hard to get anything of great quality achieved while you are living in a state of fear; even its milder, but chronic cousin, anxiety is pretty obstructive to productivity.

Safety in a choral context is rarely about physical safety - though anyone who has seen the difference that adding a rail at the back of your risers can make to concentration will know it can be very relevant. Psychological safety is the primary concern for the choral director though. And it's a more complex question than it looks at first sight.

Because, as these posts have discussed from various angles over the years, learning and artistry both entail risks. People don't grow unless they leave their comfort zones. And it is in rising to challenges that we earn the rewards of satisfaction and achievements. Indeed, Czikszentmihalyi defined a state of flow as inherently balancing challenge and capacity, hanging in the sweet spot between anxiety and boredom.

A while back I had a conversation with a relatively new director - not a complete novice, but still feeling like she was in the learning phase of the role - about music preparation. It emerged that she did not feel the need to learn to sing all the parts prior to directing a piece - whereas I had taken this for granted as something you'd do as a matter of course.

Whether or not I persuaded her of the rightness of my position (which, as you will see, I still uphold), it was an interesting conversation as it made me question things I took for granted and work out why I took the position I did. So I thought it worth recapping here. It is, after all, a practical question that affects every choral director.

Keeping warm: ironically, the room was too hot, so this prop was completely counter-productive...Second post in a series that started here

The most basic human needs are physical/physiological. We need air to breathe, we need to be warm enough but not too hot, we need food and drink to sustain us. One of the points of civilisation, I like to think, is to build an environment in which people don't have to expend all their attention on this basic maintenance and can give time and effort to more creative and interesting things: achievements rather than survival.

In one sense, then, the most urgent of physical needs are unlikely to show up in a choral rehearsal. But first-world people are still human organisms and will bring their physiological needs to rehearsal with their physical bodies. And the quality of their attention for music is directly correlated to how well these needs are met.

LABBS delegates representing Maslow's hierarchy*

Well, I've been threatening to write about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and its implication for choral directors, on and off for years, and the time has finally arrived to get my teeth into the subject properly rather than just refer to it in passing. We had a productive session on this at the Directors Day I led in January, and it's as well to follow up on that as a refresher if nothing else.

This will be a longish series of posts, but I will intersperse them with other topics in the meantime, or it will feel like we've done nothing but Maslow for weeks. After this introductory one, you can expect 7 more, each looking at one layer in the hierarchy in detail. There may or may not be further conclusions out the far end - we'll see what we find when we get there...

So, the basic concept is that human beings have all kinds of needs, some more basic, some more sophisticated. These needs are fundamental sources for human motivation, and both our state of mind and our behaviour is largely driven by them. Whilst there are some variations - both by culture and by age - and in any given circumstance people may be driven by more than one at once, understanding the nature of the needs helps us understand both ourselves and others.