Rehearsing

Rolf Dobelli’s book The Art of Thinking Clearly includes primacy and recency effects in its catalogue of cognitive errors that can mislead our judgement. We pay too much attention to both our first impressions and our most recent experiences, and tend to neglect what happens in between. Dobelli gives some advice about how we can develop strategies to compensate, but I find myself more interested in considering how we can work with this natural tendency to make it work for us.

There are two main scenarios in which these matter for musicians: rehearsing and performing. In both cases, we need to note that those whose attention we are managing - respectively the musicians learning the music and the audience listening to it - are going to be disproportionately affected by the first and last things that happen to them, and thus this is where our best opportunities to influence them lie.

A friend once told me about a time when she was playing in an orchestra and there was a rather busy and complex passage for the cello section. The conductor kept asking for more from the cellos, and eventually asked to hear that section alone. That was when they discovered that they were all miming...

This anecdote came to mind while I was reading a chapter in Rolf Dobelli’s book The Art of Thinking Clearly on social loafing. This is the phenomenon whereby the more people you add to a team, the less effort each individual commits to the work. It was first identified in 1913 by a French engineer who noticed that two horses pulling a coach did not produce double the force of a single horse. Further experiment with men pulling on a rope revealed a progressive slackening off of effort from each individual as more people were added.

Final post in a series that starts here

Self-actualisation is the 'bingo!' of human experience. It's it is when we are feeling most fully ourselves, immersed in meaningful activity that makes a positive contribution to the universe and not only draws on what we are best at, but helps us get even better at it. It's living in that sweet spot where pleasure, challenge and meaning come together.

As such, I confess, it is the type of human need I have been most nervous about writing about. What if I write a fatuous post? I have been wondering; what if I find nothing to say that isn't self-evident and gushing?

Because it is something of a responsibility to feel that other people's peak experiences are in your hands. As choir directors, we mostly deal with this responsibility by not thinking about it too hard and getting on with planning the detail. But every so often, we need to think about this stuff to check that we're fulfilling our obligations to those whose experiences are in our hands.

Eighth post in a series that starts here

In many ways, considering a choir's aesthetic needs is a continuation of the issues that arise from their cognitive needs. Just as there is a hierarchy whereby data is processed into information, which in turn is aggregated into wisdom, there is a hierarchy of musical surface details, which get aggregated into musical structures (both of which we considered in my last post), and in turn can give rise to meaning.

Making sense of music is both about the kind of syntactical structures that are essentially cognitive and the emotional and narrative resonances that allow us to perceive beauty and meaning. It is the latter that motivates our commitment and attachment to music, but it arises from the former. It is hard to care deeply about music we don't 'get'.

I once knew a singer who had spent some years working as an organ builder and harpsichord finisher. He had a pretty reliable sense of pitch - as in the kind of pitch memory that often gets labelled as 'perfect pitch', but appears in many musicians in a somewhat imperfect form. That is, perfect enough for practical purposes - if you wanted to sing something in the right key but had no fixed-pitch instrument to hand, he'd usually be able to set you right.

But if he'd been doing a lot of tuning of keyboards recently, he lost the knack. He reported that constantly tweaking up and down confused his internal gauge for pitch and he had to revert to external prompts again until it settled down.

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.