Conducting

I was working with a relatively novice conductor recently who was grappling with the challenge of how to command the attention of the choir. Anyone who has spent time either teaching or running rehearsals will sympathise, indeed will probably have had recurring anxiety dreams about failing to do so. (Please tell me I’m not the only one who has these!)

So we started out looking at various specific techniques you can use to command a room (more of which below), but very soon stumbled over a fundamental point that underpins their success or failure. It relates to the truism that you can’t control anyone else’s behaviour; all you can do is create an environment in which they will choose to control their own in the ways you desire.

I recently had a question from a director that struck me as one of those that I’m sure a lot of us grapple with on occasion. So I gave her some specific advice for the performance she was preparing for in the immediate future, but said I’d give it a think and blog in more detail about other things to consider after the big gig.

This was her question:

When I'm directing, even if in my head it's painfully slow.... It's much faster! I know it's linked to my nerves/adrenaline of competition but recently realised it happens a lot

My immediate advice was twofold:

Bournemouth at the end of October/start of November was astonishingly warm and balmy - you can see why it is a traditional British holiday town. Of course I wasted nearly all the great weather huddled inside the Bournemouth International Centre listening to people sing, but that’s how my sense of priorities works. Still, I was grateful not to find myself as windblown as you get sometimes at the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers conventions.

This was the second year I was attending without judging duties, and I can see that I’ll be saying, ‘No I’m not a judge any more,’ to people asking me about my weekend for years to come. (I mention this here in an attempt to hasten the process of people taking that on board.) I did have a new ‘official’ duty this year, though; in my role as LABBS Chorus Director Development Specialist I ran a Fringe session on ‘What Do You Want From Your Chorus Director, and What Do They Want From You?’ on the Friday afternoon.

And the traditional warm-up shot before I get started...Last Saturday took me down to work with Avon Harmony in Bristol. I last worked with them back in 2012 when their director, Alex, was relatively new in the role. You could see how much he had worked on his technique in the intervening time, and how he was being rewarded with a much more consistent and resonant sound. We spent much of the day mapping out where the next stages of development are going to lie.

First up, though, was one basic bit of conductorly bad habit that we needed to deal with. Like many directors, Alex was frequently tempted into mouthing the words. I have tried various methods to help directors break this habit over the years, often involving holding things in their mouths. Straws are good, as blowing into a straw is good for the vocal mechanism, so gives a positive benefit in how the director models their bodily set-up as well as inhibiting the habit you’re trying to eliminate.

Warm-ups with bunting!

On Wednesday night I literally had a flying visit (plane up to Scotland Wednesay afternoon, plane back to Birmingham Thursday morning) to work with Albacapella, a relatively new ladies barbershop chorus up in Aberdeenshire. They started about 3 years ago, and are just heading into what will be their second trip to compete in the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention this autumn.

The main challenge they are currently grappling with is embedding skills that they currently exercise at the level of conscious competence (i.e. they can do if they specifically focus on them) into automated processes that they do as a matter of course. Actually, that sentence could describe pretty much any choral group at any stage of development, but, with only a short history together as an ensemble, and having taken a major leap forward in skill acquisition at a retreat earlier in the year, Albacappella are particularly aware of which specific skills they are aiming to integrate.

The subject of why directors so often feel the urge to mouth the words as they conduct, and why it is a good idea to overcome this urge is a subject I have visited before. And I don’t need to say very much more than I did last time, so this will be a rather short post. But there was a communal penny-drop moment at the LABBS Directors Weekend back in July on this topic which I thought it worth sharing with you.

It was in one of the coaching sessions - three directors, half a chorus and a coach working together for 45 mins on helping the directors develop more effective technique. Often the directors wanted to work on how to become more expressive and communicative in their gestures, and often the answer was to do less at a full-body level so that the nuances of finger and facial expression weren’t constantly competing with other body parts for attention.

If you've not seen this movie, I'd recommend it for all kinds of reasons, including its illustration of the Dunning-Kruger EffectI wrote some time ago about the relationship between confidence and competence, and how when prioritising learning needs the former can often act as a reasonable proxy for the latter. There was, however, some interesting psychological research towards the back end of the last century that identified circumstances in which this correlation not only breaks down but becomes positively misleading.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect refers to the way that people who are grossly incompetent at a skill will cheerfully think they are quite good at it, as below a certain skill threshold you lack the knowledge and awareness to recognise how truly bad at something you are. Conversely, experts routinely underestimate how much better they are then the merely competent because one of the hallmarks of expertise is being able to do something fluently and without struggle.

This means that if you meet someone who describes an activity as ‘ not that hard’, they are likely to be either very very good at it or very very bad.

Final Thoughts

Well, not final thoughts ever about this event. In fact, I have several stacks of notes on things I learned or observed or discovered during the course of the weekend that I have yet to get around to writing about. It was after all intended to be the kind of event that would affect its participants for months if not years into the future. But I think I’m nearly done processing my thoughts about it as a charismatic encounter.

Okay, that’s weird. I stopped to have a think after writing that first paragraph, then after a few minutes looking back to the start of the event, remembering what it felt like as people arrived, I realised my pulse was faster and my adrenaline levels back up again. Even while I was remembering how pleasantly surprised I had been to find myself feeling calmer and less nervous than I had expected.