I wrote some years back about how I don’t really hold with jiggering with other people’s arrangements – not least because of seeing some rather inept changes to mine over the years. And I still hold this view: if an arrangement isn’t working in some way, it’s much better to refer back to the original arranger in the first instance for a solution, as they will have spent a lot of time thinking about how the thing works already, and need to be told if and when things don’t sing as well as they planned.

A somewhat different experience is when the arranger whose work you’re messing with is your own past self.

CleftomaniaLast week I had my first experience of coaching by Skype. I know some people have been doing this for some years, but I had been somewhat hesitant because my experience of the technology in its early days had been quite frustrating. It was okay as an alternative to the phone – you could live with the problems of intermittent sound and the picture freezing in return for the lack of cost and novelty of the video contact. But I had reservations about using it for something that is such a full-sensory experience as coaching.

I was persuaded to give it a go, though, by the quartet Cleftomania, who are based in Portugal. I went out to work with them last year, and will be heading out there again later this month. Not unreasonably, they’d like coaching more often than once a year, but budget and logistics make this difficult. So we gave it a try.

The Director's RolesI spent an hour and half earlier this week with a director of a women’s chorus helping her identify ways in which she can develop her own and her singers’ skills. It’s an interesting process – directors are by temperament inquisitive and enjoy analysing what’s going on in musical and interpersonal situations, but their role tends to focus this attention away from themselves and onto all those people who both outnumber and rely on them.

At the start of the session, I presented her with the diagram above as a starting point. There are multiple different ways you can divide up a conductor’s various roles, but this seemed as good a starting point as any – its purpose was not to provide an exhaustive theory of conducting, after all, it was just there to give focus and structure to our discussions.

These are three qualities that are desirable in choral (and many other types of) singing.* They are also related to each other in interesting ways – and contemplating these relationships can help clarify our thinking about rehearsal and practice strategies to develop them.

One of the things we talked about in last week’s ‘Conduct with Charisma’ workshop was the idea of ‘communion’. This is the particular form of social bonding identified by sociologist Raymond Bradley in charismatic groups whereby all members bond with all other members. This sets up the free-flow of affection and fraternal love that is experienced as a state of euphoria or exaltation.

We identified a number of different activities and structures you can set up within a choir that will either promote or inhibit the building of these bonds. These included social events (particularly those in shared social spaces, and in which the director schmoozes widely, not just hanging out with the same people each time), changing rehearsal layout/groupings so that people stand with and sing with different people, and a culture of knowing and using each others’ names.

Well, the day after the workshop, Chris Rowbury published a post over on From the Front of the Choir on why he doesn’t get people to introduce themselves at workshops until after they’ve had a good sing together. And it is a textbook example of practices that promote communion.

What is the collective noun for charismatic directors?
Saturday saw leaders of singers from around the country meeting in Birmingham for my workshop ‘Conduct with Charisma’, which regular readers will have seen advertised on my front page for the last few months. As you know, I have been blogging on this subject since last summer – and I have been researching it for over 3 years now. It started out as an off-shoot from my choral conducting book, and has developed into a fully-blown fascination in its own right.

Charisma is one of those things that a conductor is supposed to have, but is usually placed in a box marked ‘magic – do not think about’. Not helpful, especially to someone starting out in the craft, since it can so easily undermine your faith in your own legitimacy as a director. (Or is it only me who worried about this?)

So the day’s central theme was to explore the social dynamics of charismatic encounters, to understand that it’s not just about what the director does, but about a particular type of relationship between leader and group, and within the groups itself, that arises in particular types of situation.

Barry Green is a well-established professional double-bassist who is known internationally for bringing Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game principles to musicians. Given that this was a huge boon to performers at many different levels of development, it’s not surprising that he is much more famous for this rather than for his musical performances. But then again, double-bassists somehow don’t end up being the big-name performers anyway. How many can you name?

The reason I’m thinking about him in these terms is the way he has organised his 2003 follow-up to the Inner Game of Music, The Mastery of Music.*

This is a subject I was thinking about in a very particular scenario – giving feedback to competitors after a contest – and gradually realised that the thought-processes involved generalised very well to many other teaching and coaching situations I have found myself in over the years.

There are 4 basic types of factor involved.