I recently heard a choral director comment that, ‘I was told, good naturedly, not to single people out in rehearsal this week.’ This made me stop and think, particularly in the context of my recent posts on raising the stakes. The conversation moved on and I didn’t get a chance to follow up the exact situation that elicited this request, so I found myself having an imaginary debate with the person who made it over the rights and wrongs of addressing individuals in a choral situation.

Now, the people who don’t want to be singled out would say, in a general sense, that they don’t like being put on the spot. They choose to sing in a group because they feel safe there.

And the rapacious director who replies that this exactly why people should be singled out has a point. Many choirs suffer from a certain sheep-like tendency for everybody to hide behind each other, vocally and expressively. In these circumstances, having everybody feel a little more individual responsibility for making the music rather than just singing along with it is a Good Thing.

Magenta's primary triggerOne of the techniques from sports psychology that Karen O’Connor shared in her Performing On Your Mind workshop was the use of triggers, or cues. For me, this was one of those lovely moments when a concept crystallised out aspects of my own praxis. By naming the tool, it became possible to analyse it - and also to see ways in which I can apply it more tactically.

(Which is, if you think about it, what a coach is doing a lot of the time anyway: making things that a performers is experiencing perceptually available, and thus also conceptually available. Actually, that’s the function of music analysis too - I hadn’t spotted that parallel until I started this paragraph.)

This is another of those posts bringing together bits and bobs from coaching reports about an idea (such as here and here) into one place so I can point to it and say: there, that's where I explain what this is.

The 'thought point' is a concept I have been playing with for a number of years, ever since I first came across David McNeill's concept of 'growth point' - the moment when a thought starts to occur to us. In real-life conversation, you have an inkling first, a motivation, a sense of instability that demands expression. If someone interrupts you before you get to express the idea, you may find it disappears entirely - it is not yet a fully-fledged thought, only the potential for one.

One of the models that Karen O’Connor shared at her Performing On Your Mind workshop last month was a way of conceptualising different functions of the brain developed by sports psychologist Steve Peters. He divides the brain into three main areas, the frontal region, which operates the logical functions, the limbic region, seat of the emotions, and the parietal region, which acts as storage.

As Karen’s slide (which she has kindly let me share with you) shows, he then characterises these as your ‘human’ brain, your ‘chimp’ brain and your ‘computer’. This is clearly a simplified model of the brain, but its usefulness lies in its very simplicity - and it does at least bear a somewhat more direct relationship with the underlying complexities than the old stereotype of left and right hemispheres. (Which itself has some similarly valuable uses as a reflective tool - it’s just taken rather too literally rather too often.)

My recent workshop on voice and movement with Zemel Choir and their workshop guests have given me lots of food for reflection. I am very accustomed to using movement and gesture as rehearsal tools, as well as working with groups that use choreographic presentations as a matter of course. I am less accustomed to introducing these elements to a choir that does not have an established history of them, though.

This means that I have had the opportunity to learn lots about people’s reactions and modes of learning when starting from scratch. (There are echoes here of my session with Cleeve Harmony back in October - it is one thing to teach something when people know what they’re after and just want to learn how to do it, it is quite another when you have to help them imagine as well as execute the vision.)

Karen O'ConnorI spent all day Thursday at a workshop on applications of sports psychology to musical performance, run by performance coach Karen O'Connor. Karen started out as an oboist (she played with the CBSO for many years), and I knew her when I worked at the Birmingham Conservatoire, where her work with students on mental skills for performance was widely admired

I am sure that knowing of her work has encouraged my own investigations into such things as adrenaline, self-talk and NLP, and it was a delight to hear her present her work, rather than learning about it piecemeal by hearsay. The ideas involved a pleasing mix of things that resonated with my current praxis, and concepts/approaches that were new to me, and the discussions between the delegates added a rich range of different perspectives on them and possibilities for their application. I would highly recommend the day to anyone involved in facilitating performance.

This year's winners, Patchwork

LABBS Convention this year saw the UK’s second mixed quartet contest, following on from last year’s inaugural event. The standard was once again good, and the audience support enthusiastic, so it looks like it could be finding itself a regular fixture in the British barbershop year.

I reflected at some length after last year’s contest on the gender identity and voice-part identity interplays and instabilities that the genre brings out, and this year’s impressions are on similar themes.

This post started out as a paragraph in my account of the Zemel workshop on singing and movement, but grew into a post in its own right. It concerns an insight I had during the workshop that - as these things so often do - feels a bit obvious now I write it down, but felt like quite a penny-drop moment at the time.

It concerns the cognitive challenge of fitting gestures to lyrics when your part of a choral texture is singing something other than those lyrics. Lyric-based gestures, when designed to fit naturalistically to the concepts in the narrative (i.e. paced like natural speech in their frequency and not unduly pantomimic or literal in form) actually help you remember the words, once you have got over the shock to the system of operating hands and voice at the same time.

But choral arrangements don’t always give everybody all the words. Sometimes you have oohs or ahs or individual words picked out of the longer narrative. Singing these while doing gestures designed to go with the lyrics is a rather more demanding task.