In the Diamond Jubilee concert at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod, Lesley Garrett introduced the line-up of herself, violinist Nicola Benedetti, trumpeter Alison Balsom and conductor Sian Edwards as ‘classical girl power’. I found myself simultaneously cheered at this list of soloists and wistful that it should still be a matter of remark. ‘Girl Power’ is after all one of those odd phrases that encapsulates optimism and defeatism at the same time.

However, the concert was a very interesting case-study in different solutions to the presentational questions female musicians need to address in their roles as public figures. As I have written about before, there are competing imperatives between the ideologies of classical music that render the musician invisible to ‘let the music speak for itself’ and the general cultural expectation that the female body will be on display, subject to public gaze.

One of Magenta’s singers recently asked if we could give some attention to a particular part of one of our songs in a rehearsal because the particular thing she was grappling with is hard to practise by yourself. Not only did this gladden my heart (I love it when people give me information that will help me make rehearsals really productive), but it also got me thinking (which is actually another cause for gladness).

So, I started to classify the skills we need in a choir according to whether you can practise them by yourself or whether you need other people there to work on them.

It is a feature of charismatic leaders that they are most famously depicted surrounded by crowds. Hitler addressing his rallies, Jesus feeding the five thousand: one of the ways we recognise charismatic authority is by its power to galvanise large groups.

But I have been thinking recently about how the large groups themselves may be part of the dynamic that generates the charismatic encounter. If we consider Raymond Bradley's conception of charisma as a property that emerges from a group with a particular set of beliefs and relational structures that attribute the extraordinary powers to a particular person or social position, it seems that the crowd is as important as the leader in creating the experience.

I have been thinking about this in particular in relation to the phenomenon of massed-choir events. These may be a feature of festivals, of civic events, or as one of the commercial ventures that have sprung up in recent years that offer participants local preparation over a number of weeks leading up to a concert in a major venue. If you lead a choir, you will get reasonably regular invitations to bring your singers along to participate in these.

I recently found myself giving some advice about running a rehearsal to the effect that it is more important to move onto the next activity at the scheduled time than it is to complete the task in hand. And as I drew breath to say why I would recommend this, I realised that it's exactly the kind of thing to blog about: simple on the surface, but more interesting the longer you think about it.

So to start with the more simple and obvious advantages to moving on:

It's a well-documented feature of the creative life that the biggest obstacles to productivity are internal. You know you should get on with the work, you want - in principle - to get on with the work, but in practice, you don't. You check your email, you eat a bowl of cereal, you do the hoovering.* Mark Forster refers to this active procrastination as resistance.

Another well-documented feature of creativity is what Sally Holloway calls 'background processing'. You work at something for a period of time, and get stuck. Then, later the solution to your problem will magically appear when you're out for a walk, or cooking, or just waking up. The inner recesses of your brain continue to work on things between your conscious sessions focused upon it. If you prefer a more organic, rather than computer-based metaphor for this process, I also think of it sometimes in ruminant terms - the conscious effort is the process of chewing the cud, then you send it down to your brain's second stomach for digestion between times.

A central concept of sports psychology is ‘self-talk’ – the internal dialogue people have with themselves about what they’re doing. The content and tone of this self-talk, and the ways people account for their successes and failures has a major impact on how effectively they develop their skills and how successfully they put them into practice when it really counts.

Everybody working on a complex skill will experience a mix of achievement and disappointment. But people often hold quite different beliefs about the two. If you tell yourself that triumphs are temporary and local, but your weaknesses are permanent and systemic, it will be very hard to get any better. But if you tell yourself that accomplishment is the normal state of affairs, with collapses as aberrations, you are going to be both more motivated to address the problems as you believe you can fix them.

In summary:
Success = normal-positive, negative-fluke

Whilst writing my recent post on making your breath last a whole phrase, I suddenly realised I had developed an opinion on something I had previously felt quite mildly about. This is the practice of 'choral breathing'. By this I mean the technique whereby individuals can manage their own breath within the choral sound, most succinctly summarised by the instruction, 'You can breathe wherever you like, so long as I don't hear you'. The object is to preserve the integrity of the overall musical flow as perceived by the audience.

There are a number technical elements choristers need to master to make this happen. First, you need to stagger your breathing with your neighbours so you don't all take your sneaky cheat top-up breaths at the same time. Second, you need to resist the temptation to breathe in the obvious mid-phrase points. Third, you need to avoid closing word sounds early to breathe - so you need to learn to take your breath when your mouth is open on a vowel.

Breath control is a work-in-progress for all of us. Our past selves were less good at it than we are now having worked on it, but we all find that we could just do with a bit more. Like many aspects of technique, there are both physical and mental dimensions to this. The development of muscular control is to significant extent a matter of fitness: if you've not sung for a bit, you find it harder work to access the control you have at your command when you're in practice.

But training the muscles alone won't make your breath last to the end of the phrase. It's also a matter of how you mentally engage with the music. This is a theme I have explored previously in posts on Singing Long Phrases and Resonance, Legato and Support, and back in March, a comment from Trish articulated the relationship between continuity of breath and continuity of thought beautifully:

When the flow of breathing is interrupted, concentration is broken and the flow of awareness progresses in jumps and starts.