One of the most enlightening books I have ever read is David McNeill’s Gesture and Thought. I drew on its theoretical findings for my central discussions of conducting gesture in my recently published book on choral conducting. It is a wonderful thing when you find a theory that explains so clearly things that you see in real life.

Tone Bianca DahlOne of the sessions at the ABCD Convention at the end of August was workshop on communication between choir, conductor and audience led by Tone Bianca Dahl. Tone teaches choral conducting at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and her book on this subject has recently been translated into English. Her central question in the presentation was: what creates the magic?; and can we create it at will?

Awareness is the first of the three cornerstones of the inner game approach. It refers to the non-judgemental perception of what we’re doing. Instead of the kind of self-monitoring that immediately classifies what we’re doing as either adequate or inadequate, it aims simply to get a clearer a picture of what’s going on, without leaping to judgement. It’s rather like the NLP principle that there’s no failure, only feedback, and involves replacing the instinct to say to yourself, ‘that was crap,’ with ‘what happened there?’

On Wednesday evening I had another visit to coach my friends at Harmony InSpires, near Oxford. I last heard them back in November 2008, when they had recently acquired a lot of new members, and it was good to see that lots of those new members were still there, and more new ones arriving on a regular basis. Whether you have a net inflow or outflow of singers is always a good indication as to the health of a chorus!

We spent much of the evening thinking about the breath, and the way it is the key to delivering musical flow.

Farnham Youth Choir in open rehearsalThe August bank holiday weekend always has far more fun things going on than one could possibly go to, and this year I spent it in Winchester at the Association of British Choral Directors Convention. I was presenting on the Sunday morning, but had the rest of the time available to hear other people’s sessions, mooch about the Exhibition, go to the gala concert and generally have a fun time hanging out with a bunch of interesting people.

I’ve been threatening since last winter to write about how the Inner Game ideas can inform rehearsal techniques, and the time has at last arrived. This post will outline some big-picture principles, and three subsequent ones will look at how to apply the three central concepts of awareness, will and trust in choral contexts.

But for those who are not familiar with Inner Game ideas at all, here’s a bit of background.

There has been an interesting thread of discussions over on Choralnet recently in response to another blogger’s claim that the Ambassadors of Harmony set ‘a new standard in choral music’ in their performance at this year’s International barbershop convention. The responses range from the enthusiastic to the disdainful, with some interesting variants in each camp – a wonderful example, indeed, of the way that aesthetic values are not static, but culturally negotiated on an ongoing basis.

Lying behind some of the comments are a set of cultural tensions that have existed in music for at least a couple of centuries if not more.

A few months back I read an old, old book about how to set up a small business called The E-Myth, by Michael E. Gerber. To give you an idea how old it is: it was written before the turn of phrase ‘E-something’ meant anything. So in fact the E here isn’t anything electronic, but refers to entrepreneurs. His basic point is that the idea that successful businesses are down to the special qualities of entrepreneurial people is a myth, and that good organization has more to do with it.

I may come back in another post to how his model plays out for starting a choir (if I can face in retrospect dealing with all the things I did wrong!). But for today, I’d like just to focus in on a useful distinction he makes between your commodity and your product.

The commodity is what you make in the factory; the product is what your customer wants to gain by buying it.