Rehearsing

The Contemporary A Cappella Stream in performance

I spent Sunday at the fifth annual A Cappella Spring Fest to be held in the Cornerstone arts centre in Didcot. It’s a rather wonderful event, hosted by a couple of local choirs, whose ongoing collaboration has produced slick organisation and a confident and helpful team. If you’re anywhere near Oxfordshire on the second weekend in March next year, I’d recommend it as a way to spend a day with 120 like-minded singers.

The day involves plenary sessions at start and end for warm-up and work on the Fest Song all together in the morning, and then performances in the afternoon. It then offers a choice of classes for two sessions, then two sessions in genre-themed groups working on a piece to share at the end of the day. This year there were streams for gospel, classical, barbershop, a new-to-a-cappella group, and I was leading the contemporary a cappella stream.

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.

The power dynamics of choral directing is a significant theme in my second book, which I explored using Foucault’s ideas of discipline and surveillance. It is a subject I have been mulling over again recently, in the light of a comment from Mark on my post about non-musical things choir members can do to transform their choir. Mark expressed a not unreasonable wish that directors would offer a quid pro quo of courtesy towards their singers.

There are interesting things to be explored here about the social contract of the choral rehearsal, but the thing that leapt out at me first from Mark’s words was the depth of feeling behind them. Directors have such a power to affect the experience and emotional state of the people they conduct, and I am not sure that we always remember this.

I have written on a number of occasions about that phenomenon whereby people practise/rehearse most diligently, but don’t seem to get significantly better. (Previous posts are here, here and here.) I was thinking about it again recently, having heard a number of conversations in which people were having to deal with emotional fall-out from this experience in the context of a competitive environment.

There were three main elements that struck me about what people were struggling with. Their ensembles had (a) worked their socks off, (b) found themselves with a slightly lower score than the year before, and (c) had been told by their friends that they were sounding better and better. I wanted to stop and reflect on each of these elements, as they form a clear and recognisable pattern that a lot of groups experience.

This post started out as noting some info I wanted to share with the people who are starting with Magenta this New Year. And as I typed, facts blossomed into explanations, and I thought: you know what, I could publish this as a blog post rather than just sending it round by email, just in case anyone else finds it useful. Most of how choirs develop, after all, is by people sharing their ideas, and other people thinking, ‘Oh, I could just adapt that for my lot, and it would exactly meet such-and-such need.’

So, to our new singers: you will have already seen these things happening when you came to observe a rehearsal before joining. These are the protocols and rationales that lie behind the behaviours you observed.

It’s probably not a surprise to hear that I’m still thinking about this question of a choir’s values. If you’ve hung out with me at all in this blog over the years, you’ll recognise that it has that pleasing combination of being something wide-ranging and abstract to theorise about, but which is also intensely practical. Exactly the kind of thing that gets me all lit up and interested.

Anyway, having noticed how a clear sense of your choir’s values is most urgently needed at the moments of crisis, I have been thinking about things we can do during the ebb-and-flow of choral life to build a secure and shared set of values so we have it ready and in good order when we really need it. Moments of crisis draw bring the values to the surface, but they’re really not the best time to start working out what we believe in.

The three main areas I have been thinking about are:

And if you need to wear your vocal identity, you can buy the t-shirt hereI don’t write very often about the one-to-one mentoring work I do with individual directors. The things they need to work through are often rather too personal to share with the wider world, involving their own internal insecurities and the subtle interpersonal relationships of choir politics. But every so often, we come across something that is generalisable in such as way to be both of interest beyond their individual circumstances and - as a result - essentially anonymous.

One recent session covered, among other things, how to address an endemic problem with the tonal centre slipping. (See, you can’t identify the ensemble from that!) The director identified vocal production issues in the bass section as one factor here, and talked about the work she was already doing to lift and lighten the tone. But she also said something wonderfully perceptive about the psychological processes associated with the vocal issues.

I have mentioned before (here and here) Rolf Dobelli’s catalogue of common thinking errors in his book The Art of Thinking Clearly. Once again, I find myself getting distracted from his purpose of how to avoid the distorting in one’s own thinking onto ways in which how exploiting the error in others can be useful for choral purposes.

Effort Justification is a form of cognitive dissonance whereby we value something for the amount of effort it has required from us to achieve it rather than for the actual difference it makes to our lives. It also gets called the ‘IKEA effect’, after the way that we like furniture that we have assembled ourselves more than equivalent furniture bought ready-made. The more of ourselves we have invested in something, the more are committed to it, and this may be quite out of proportion to what we’d think of it seen from the outside.