On When to Persist, and When to Forgive…

I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about the balance between being uncompromising with one’s standards, and about when to let things slide. I’ve been having a number of conversations with people about this, and have also (possibly as a consequence) been particularly aware of it as a question in my own praxis.

Clearly, holding people (including oneself) to a level that you know they can achieve is key to maintaining and developing performance standards. Jim Clancy puts transforming good things that you do sometimes into things you do all the time at the heart of excellence; John Bertalot writes about choral rehearsing as being like pushing a man up a greasy pole.

On Vulnerability

The leadership literature, both conductor-specific and general (which, come to think of it, I usually read through the lens of the conductor’s role), often talks about the importance of allowing yourself to be vulnerable as a means to inspire trust. This is usually framed in terms of admitting when you don’t know something, or that you need help.

All of which, on the face of it is perfectly reasonable. A leader doesn’t have to be omniscient or infallible to be effective – which is just as well given that human beings are typically neither. And I’ve always read these pronouncements with a degree of complacency, since I am very comfortable sharing my fallibility. I’ve known myself long enough to know how well developed my capacity for truly dumb errors is, and am endlessly grateful when people spot them for me.

Building the Arc with Norwich Harmony

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Note that’s ‘arc’ with a C; whilst it was a bit rainy in Norfolk at the weekend, we didn’t need to construct emergency rescue vessels for us and all land mammals on this occasion. But we did have a productive time thinking about expressive musical shape and how it relates to both narrative and vocal legato.

I have visited Norwich Harmony for coaching days several times over the years, but this was the first time I joined them for a full weekend’s retreat. They had an interesting model, choosing a venue that consisted of a number of holiday cottages around a central courtyard and event room. Most of the catering was organised within the groups sharing each cottage, except for a bring-and-share dinner on Friday and a meal delivered by outside caterers on the Saturday.

More On the Relationship of Structure to Detail

I recently reflected on how Abby Whiteside’s book Indispensables in Piano Playing had helped bring into focus thoughts I had been toying with about the mapping of the structures of a body that plays music onto structures implicit in the music itself. The other set of thoughts she helped bring to the surface were about theoretical traditions in how we think about music.

Those of you with a background in academic music will recognise the distinction between structure and ornament, and the idea of shunting attentionally between different levels of structure (surface details to mid-range and longer-range processes) as belonging to the theoretical tradition generally taught in higher education under the banner of Schenkerian Analysis.

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