Excellence

Every so often, you hear someone articulate the idea that ‘So-and-so is a very good director, but their choir isn’t very good’. And when I hear this, my brain goes into melt-down at the sheer invalidity of this concept. The only measure of a conductor’s quality is the standard of performances they elicit from the musicians they work with. If your ensemble isn’t very good, it’s because the director isn’t very good.

Okay, so there are some caveats here. I anticipate your objections.

The raw material makes a difference. A director who is working with novices will not, from a standing start, produce results as good as one working with experienced musicians. This is particularly true of instrumental groups, but also a fair generalisation for singers. You’d expect auditioned choirs to achieve more than non-auditioned, as they have filtered out all the people who lack whichever set of skills you test for at audition.

I have been thinking quite a lot about this recently, mostly in the context of helping directors develop, but - as so often happens in this endeavour - the thoughts spread easily beyond the specialist field of choral music out into all kinds of corners of Real Life. Ensemble musicianship is, after all, about working with human beings.

And, in much the same way that people who train to become counsellors and therapists themselves have to undergo counselling and therapy, educators can’t go very long thinking about the people whose development they are supporting without stopping to consider their own progress. Hence the funny mix of naval-gazing and advice that sometimes emerges...

So, as directors (and in our various other roles in life), we all have areas where we are reasonably confident and secure. We also have areas that we are a bit scared of, that we fear we are not as strong in as we should be. We may try not to think about them too much, which means we remain a bit hazy about exactly what it is we feel inadequate about, but the awareness of it lurks at the back of our minds, ready to assail us in the dead of night whenever things go a bit wobbly.

We spend a lot of time and energy in choral groups thinking about how to improve the performance of the ensemble. And, not unreasonably, we focus much of this attention on musical and vocal skills. I would be the first to agree that learning how to sing better, and how to make better music are useful outlets for a choir’s energies.

But every so often, it is worth reflecting on habits and ways of being that a choir has developed, as individuals and as a collective, that are nothing to do with music or singing, but which can either facilitate or hinder the overall progress that choir makes.

Here are four things that every choir member can manage, whatever their current skills or levels of experience, that will actively help their choir improve.

The last event we went to before leaving Edinburgh was David Patrick’s Jazz Rite of Spring. It has got me thinking about cross-over aesthetics - why they work, why they don’t - but before I get into that, I’d just like to enthuse for a paragraph or two about the performance itself.

It was performed by an 8-piece jazz ensemble, and much of it was a very faithful transcription of the original score for these reduced forces. But every so often they’d hang out on a riff longer than Stravinsky had specified, and put in a solo. The transitions between the two modes were remarkably convincing. There was one where I felt the holding pattern of the riff and easing back onto the score interrupted a build-and-release passage such that the moment of arrival wasn’t as effective as it might have been, but then again you have to accept that not every person thinks of musical shape in the same way.

The nature of the ensemble mitigated towards a thrilling, edge-of-your-seat performance, even without the improvised passages. If you think about the usual scoring of the Rite, and then imagine the whole lot played by just 8 people...they all had a lot more work to do than your average orchestral player. Nobody got any down-time to speak of; all were on duty throughout.

This post arises from the same circumstances as my recent one about interpreting barbershop ballads. I was listening to some recordings of work-in-progress with the remit of giving advice about the musical choices they were making about a song's delivery. The nitty-gritty stuff helped me crystallise observations about musical delivery and pacing, but I ended up with a pile of left-over thoughts about the relationship between analysis and intuition in developing performances, which is what I am going to be sorting through here.

You see, I had been given that remit because I have certain technical skills. I can identify chords; I can use notation to infer not just what to sing, but how. A lot of the ineffective musical moments you encounter in barbershop world come from a lack of that analysis, an over-reliance on lyric to tell you everything about how a song should go, without working out what the melody, harmony, voicing and embellishment strategies are suggesting.

I have written several times over the years about how ‘talent’ is a socially constructed narrative, and about the obsessive, dedicated work that goes into creating the skills that get labelled as ‘talent’. What I have been hitherto somewhat muted about is the damage that the mythology of talent does to our culture, and to individuals within it. This has come into focus for me in recent months as I have been writing about the phenomenon of the ‘non-singer’ as part of a book chapter for Oxford University Press.

The ‘non-singer’ is the inevitable by-product of our cultural construction of talent. We approach talent with a kind of magical thinking that sees the capacity for music (or indeed for all kinds of other specialist activities) as somehow both genetic and supernaturally bestowed upon particular, ‘gifted’ people, who are thereby set apart from normal mortals.

I am recently back from a trip to the Edinburgh Festivals, which offer what may be the richest, most varied and most genuinely international collection of common cold viruses in the world. Coming home with ‘festival flu’ is, apparently, all part of the experience. In five days we went to 15 events and 2 exhibitions; some were professional, some amateur; some charged for entry, others didn’t (interestingly, this is not quite the same division as pro/am); and covering comedy, music, theatre, visual arts and cultural commentary. I also came home with incipient artistic indigestion.

I’ll have some specific thoughts to tease out in response to some of these events (and/or in response to the peculiar juxtaposition of some of these events) in future posts. But in the first instance, I’d like to mull on some general points about the nature of the Fringe Festival in particular, and the effect it has on both the performers involved and the performances they produce.

There are only so many decisions you can make in one day. And when you have made too many, you lose your willpower. Rolf Dobelli reports on the psychological studies that demonstrated this very clearly, and also shows some of the consequences for real-life situations such as the criminal justice system. But, apart from recommending a rest and a snack to recover, he doesn’t really offer much help in dealing with decision fatigue.

This matters to everyone, but I’m particularly interested in how it impacts on the creative process. We often talk about creativity as if it is some kind of magical thing bestowed on us from above, not least because the source of our best ideas is only partly and intermittently susceptible to conversant self-awareness. But the actual activity of generating creative products is essentially one of making decisions. Global decisions (what to produce, for whom, of what size, with commitments to which genre(s)); artistic decisions (expressive register, characterisation, emotional shape); technical decisions (key, voicing, texture, chord choice). Think how much time you spend in planning, day-dreaming, and trial-and-error tinkering - all those are species of decision-making activity.