Rehearsing

Floddy the Hippo of Belonging: sorry about the camera-shake - it must have been an emotional moment...Fourth post in a series that starts here

After physical survival and safety, our next most primal needs are social. We need to feel connected to others, to feel like we belong.

Fortunately, choirs are good for this. Indeed, the two main reasons people join choirs are (a) 'I'd like to sing, and I might make some friends, and (b) 'I'd like to make some new friends, and it might be fun to sing'. So, we can feel good about what we offer our members on this one.

Having said that, it is possible to feel isolated in a choir. Sometimes new members feel like everyone already knows each other, and it's hard to find a conversation. Choral seating arrangements that keep everyone in rows inhibit you from interacting with each other. (Logistically there may be good reasons for this - the bigger the choir the more urgent are the issues of crowd control after all - but it still has an impact on belonging needs.) Sometimes the people addressing the choir (primarily the director, but also others making announcements) use cultural references that make you feel excluded.

Frustration is the enemy of progress.

If you enjoy irony, you will be pleased to know that immediately after I wrote that first sentence, my laptop froze and stopped responding for five minutes. I had the presence of mind to remain patient, though if I had been writing on pretty much any other subject, I may not have done.

That feeling of being thwarted by the universe is one that periodically visits anyone who tries to get stuff done. It is an unpleasant experience: you feel all snarled up, putting in the effort but failing to get the results you feel those efforts deserve. You feel disempowered and outraged. It’s not just that you feel stuck, you feel that is unreasonable to be stuck.

Third post in a series that starts here

After our basic physical needs, the next most primal need we have is to feel safe. It is hard to get anything of great quality achieved while you are living in a state of fear; even its milder, but chronic cousin, anxiety is pretty obstructive to productivity.

Safety in a choral context is rarely about physical safety - though anyone who has seen the difference that adding a rail at the back of your risers can make to concentration will know it can be very relevant. Psychological safety is the primary concern for the choral director though. And it's a more complex question than it looks at first sight.

Because, as these posts have discussed from various angles over the years, learning and artistry both entail risks. People don't grow unless they leave their comfort zones. And it is in rising to challenges that we earn the rewards of satisfaction and achievements. Indeed, Czikszentmihalyi defined a state of flow as inherently balancing challenge and capacity, hanging in the sweet spot between anxiety and boredom.

A while back I had a conversation with a relatively new director - not a complete novice, but still feeling like she was in the learning phase of the role - about music preparation. It emerged that she did not feel the need to learn to sing all the parts prior to directing a piece - whereas I had taken this for granted as something you'd do as a matter of course.

Whether or not I persuaded her of the rightness of my position (which, as you will see, I still uphold), it was an interesting conversation as it made me question things I took for granted and work out why I took the position I did. So I thought it worth recapping here. It is, after all, a practical question that affects every choral director.

Keeping warm: ironically, the room was too hot, so this prop was completely counter-productive...Second post in a series that started here

The most basic human needs are physical/physiological. We need air to breathe, we need to be warm enough but not too hot, we need food and drink to sustain us. One of the points of civilisation, I like to think, is to build an environment in which people don't have to expend all their attention on this basic maintenance and can give time and effort to more creative and interesting things: achievements rather than survival.

In one sense, then, the most urgent of physical needs are unlikely to show up in a choral rehearsal. But first-world people are still human organisms and will bring their physiological needs to rehearsal with their physical bodies. And the quality of their attention for music is directly correlated to how well these needs are met.

LABBS delegates representing Maslow's hierarchy*

Well, I've been threatening to write about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and its implication for choral directors, on and off for years, and the time has finally arrived to get my teeth into the subject properly rather than just refer to it in passing. We had a productive session on this at the Directors Day I led in January, and it's as well to follow up on that as a refresher if nothing else.

This will be a longish series of posts, but I will intersperse them with other topics in the meantime, or it will feel like we've done nothing but Maslow for weeks. After this introductory one, you can expect 7 more, each looking at one layer in the hierarchy in detail. There may or may not be further conclusions out the far end - we'll see what we find when we get there...

So, the basic concept is that human beings have all kinds of needs, some more basic, some more sophisticated. These needs are fundamental sources for human motivation, and both our state of mind and our behaviour is largely driven by them. Whilst there are some variations - both by culture and by age - and in any given circumstance people may be driven by more than one at once, understanding the nature of the needs helps us understand both ourselves and others.

Here is a paradox for you. Both these statements are, as generalisations, true:

1. People need to have sung something at least five times for it to get properly embedded in memory
2. After the third time through it, people's attention quality drops of significantly

This is one of the central challenges of choral rehearsal. It is not just that, whilst we need repetition to learn, repetition degrades attention. It's that this waning starts before we have done enough to cement learning. So it's not just a matter of not repeating things too much - as this will mean we are not repeating them enough.

Do you see what I mean?

See main post for enlarged image...

I wrote back before Christmas about the principle of singling out individuals in rehearsal - when and how it is useful, when and how it may be counter-productive. As I worked through the different scenarios and examples it got me reflecting on, I realised I was mapping the focus on individuals vs group onto the Yerkes-Dodson curve that charts arousal and performance level.

A focus on individuals makes everybody feel slightly less psychologically safe - not just the people singled out, but everyone else too as they become more aware that they too are individually visible. This results in an increased level of arousal.

If the choir is being a bit dozy or passive, then this is exactly what you need: a bit more alertness and focus in the brain, a bit more energy and readiness-for-action in the body. If the choir is anxious or floundering, though, this is the last thing you need, as adding adrenaline to an over-stressed performance just makes it worse.