Excellence

The Director's RolesI spent an hour and half earlier this week with a director of a women’s chorus helping her identify ways in which she can develop her own and her singers’ skills. It’s an interesting process – directors are by temperament inquisitive and enjoy analysing what’s going on in musical and interpersonal situations, but their role tends to focus this attention away from themselves and onto all those people who both outnumber and rely on them.

At the start of the session, I presented her with the diagram above as a starting point. There are multiple different ways you can divide up a conductor’s various roles, but this seemed as good a starting point as any – its purpose was not to provide an exhaustive theory of conducting, after all, it was just there to give focus and structure to our discussions.

Barry Green is a well-established professional double-bassist who is known internationally for bringing Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game principles to musicians. Given that this was a huge boon to performers at many different levels of development, it’s not surprising that he is much more famous for this rather than for his musical performances. But then again, double-bassists somehow don’t end up being the big-name performers anyway. How many can you name?

The reason I’m thinking about him in these terms is the way he has organised his 2003 follow-up to the Inner Game of Music, The Mastery of Music.*

I recently read Robin Stuart-Kotze’s book Performance: The Secrets of Successful Behaviour. I picked it up wondering if it was going to be one of the business-management genre books that have been feeding into my charisma project. Not directly, it turns out, and where it does, mostly by contrast. Nonetheless, it proved a stimulating read, both in the dimensions in which I found myself persuaded, and in those where I found myself wanting to argue back. (Possibly that is the definition of a stimulating book!)

Anyway, one of the areas I found particularly useful was where he discusses performance-blocking behaviours – i.e. those habits and forms of interaction that actively prevent people from doing well. The problem with these is not just that they are counter-productive, but also that they are highly contagious. So one person’s blocking behaviours very quickly inspire similarly unhelpful habits in others.

Just before Christmas, a friend showed me this video entitled 'One-Moment Meditation'. Its basic premise was that meditative techniques don’t necessarily require a special time and place and commitment, but can be integrated into our daily lives and still have a positive impact.

In addition to its primary message, it set off two related trains of thought.

Back before Christmas, Tom Carter came over here and engaged in some really productive debate in response to my post on Stanislavski and Schenker. (Joke on me: I had wondered whether it was going to be an excessively obscure subject, but got probably the most response I’ve had for ages. Shows the limits of my predictive power!) This post is a follow-up to a couple of loose ends that got left dangling.

First, Tom asked:

So, could you talk more about the performances you experienced in which the singers identified local objectives without integrating them into a super-objective? Or those in which they had detail but missed on the global?

The stories of many charismatic leaders feature a period in the wilderness. In the case of Jesus, of course, the wilderness is literal, and provides both the archetype and metaphor used to describe the experience in others. Hitler, for example, spent much of the 1920s as an obscure, fringe political figure - indeed, he wrote Mein Kampf in prison; you don’t get much more marginalised than that. Churchill, meanwhile, spent much of the 1930s out of government and swimming against the prevailing political tide in his criticism of the appeasement policy.

(As an aside: it is a truism that charisma itself if morally neutral, and can be turned to positive or malign effect. A corollary of this is that a useful initial-plausibility test for any theory that purports to explain charisma is to see how well it generalises to both Hitler and Jesus.)

So, there are two dimensions to the wilderness phase that I have been trying to tease out which may be significant.

When people are in the early stages of a learning process and feeling a bit daunted, you’ll often hear them being encouraged to ‘take baby steps’. Now, actually, I think this is good advice (for reasons I’ll get onto later), but the way it is usually articulated completely misreads the metaphor. People say ‘baby steps – little by little’, as if the adjective means miniature version of normal steps, rather than steps as taken by babies.

This post from the Bulletproof Musician is a case in point. I feel a bit mean picking on it, since mostly I really admire the articles over there (and if you haven’t been over there before, I encourage you to spend the rest of the afternoon having a good browse). And actually, the basic point of the article – that small incremental changes in behaviour add up over time to significant improvements in performance – is sound. But that’s kaizen, not baby steps.

I’ve been thinking a lot in recent years about confidence, and its relationship with competence. The two can so often seem to go together…but not so reliably that you can generalise about the correlation. Indeed, it is when the two seem mismatched that it feels dysfunctional. A novice who feels tentative seems as rational in their relationship with praxis as a self-possessed virtuoso. But a good performer wracked with self-doubt is a cause for concern, while an ebullient mediocrity just seems deluded.