Choral

The Hayes Conference Centre: resplendent in the spring sunshineEarlier this week I had the pleasure of delivering some sessions at the Britsh Kodály Academy’s Spring Course. I was there straddling my two worlds: delivering to singers and choral conductors from a largely classical barckground (several of whom I already knew, indeed, through the Association of British Choral Directors), but there as an expert in barbershop music.

My contributions included a lecture on the history and culture of barbershop - with the aim of helping people who had probably happened across the genre but knew little about the detail of either its craft or ethos make sense of what they heard - and two practical workshops on expanded sound. For these I stole Gage Averill’s rather wonderful turn of phrase ‘Romancing the Tone’ as my title, and focused on the lessons in practical acoustics and the kinaesthetic pleasures of harmony that barbershop has taught me and that I use with musicians from any and all backgrounds.

When you get an email with the subject line 'quick question', you sometimes know that, while the question might be quick, finding the answer is actually your whole life's work. A recent email from a conductor I've been working with contained the following question:

I was thinking about what you were saying about using too much of my body. It was something I had been aware of, and I intend to work on it. But I was trying to work out how it came about. I think it’s a question of rehearsal technique – trying to convey the ‘shape’ of the song to the chorus without having to break it down. When I start a song, how is it best to teach the overall shape? Would you do it verbally? Break it down section by section? I think I was being lazy and trying, perhaps, to achieve too much too quickly by showing them rather than explaining it very well.

Now, some directors don't have this problem. They find standing still and beating time without flapping round like a tent in a hurricane comes naturally. For many of us, however, the challenge is how to keep our physical expressiveness under control.

One small bit of unfinished business from my first post on this subject last month is the question from the director I quoted of whether it is harder to get people to volunteer in a small chorus. It seems like a good question, and my initial hunch is: not necessarily, but there could be some kind of link between choir size and development of infrastructure.

So, first, why 'not necessarily'. Just because your choir is small doesn't mean that the people in it are any less intelligent or willing or up-for-it. Yes, there will be fewer people to do the jobs, but many of the jobs are commensurately smaller, so there is no logical reason why you shouldn't find enough people to get everything done. Indeed, quartets seem to manage all their logistics, music acquisition, coaching needs, publicity and finance with only four of them. Numbers aren't an inherent defining factor here.

I recently learned the word 'repurpose' on one of those lists of mildly useful household tips that circulate round the internet. (They always make of me think of the Viz example: 'A cigar case full of angry wasps makes an inexpensive vibrator'.) It has a more thoughtful and less jerry-rigged feel to it than 'hack' (as in 'life-hack' or the more specific IKEA-hack*), and so I'm happy to use it to describe the manner in which I have appropriated an idea.

The concept is one shared by Karen O'Connor in her Performing on Your Mind workshop back in November, called 'parking'. It is a technique for sequestering anxieties, especially those outside your circle of influence. If something bothers you, but is completely beyond your control, then once you have figured out there is nothing you can do that will make a difference there is nothing to be gained by giving it any further attention.

In the first two posts in this series, we looked at the problem of ageing choirs (or indeed voluntary organisations in general) and how their difficulties recruiting the next generation of members can be analysed in terms of the routinisation of charisma. We've got to the point of addressing what we can actually do about this.

I should possibly add at this point (maybe I should have done earlier!) that whilst I'm writing these posts in largely theoretical terms, I am mentally testing them out on a whole bunch of real-life case-studies as I go. But I'm not citing these very much, except the odd anonymised anecdote, because I don't think it is the kind of thing where commenting publicly would be kind to the groups involved. We all know groups to whom these comments could apply to a greater or lesser extent - it's not going to help them overcome their challenges to point the finger at them.

More helpful, I hope, are the following points.

Bradley & Pibram's diagram: the dynamics of a charismatic group

In my last post I started the process analysing the problems faced by ageing choirs in terms of the routinization of charisma. If you missed it, the back-story is only a click away; I'll wait here for you to see where we'd got to so far.

All caught up? Right, we were about to look at the group dynamic of a once-charismatic organisation that had settled into a happy and successful mode of operation. For this we are going to revisit Bradley and Pibram's diagram of the relationship between two key elements of a charismatic group: control and flux.

Flux (originally theorised as 'communion') is that sense of euphoric inter-connection where individuals merge their identities into the group. It is generated by certain specific forms of relationship within the group, characterised by each member having access to every other member without exclusionary sub-groups or cliques. Control (originally described as 'power') is the top-down authority that keeps the emotional energy thus generated in check.

This started off as an exploration of the problem of ageing choirs (and indeed choral organisations). There are so many choirs in the UK (and I imagine beyond) that are populated almost entirely by retired folk who are desperate to recruit some young blood to replace those that gradually fall prey to illness or infirmity. But it has developed into a wider analysis that could potentially help choirs that have not yet got to that stage head the problems off at the pass.

It may also get divided into more than one post. I'm not sure at this introductory point how far the ideas will grow.

So, a couple of observations about the ageing choir.

In my recent post about the nature of conductor-choir attention, I was focusing primarily on the flow of information between director and singers. How if the conductor is thinking about ‘depicting’ the music to the choir more than they are noticing how the choir is (how they sound, how they look), then that limits their opportunity to adapt in real time to the needs of the emerging music.

It occurred to me as I was finishing that post that there’s also a technical factor at play here. I noted that you can tell when a director is really listening hard, from their body language - the whole posture and gesture space becomes more integrated, more connected, visually ‘quieter’. A director looks at their best, that is, when they are not thinking about how they look, but instead about how their choir sounds.