Excellence

Every change we make has unintended consequences, we all know that. But you can tell a good idea by the way that the unintended consequences are benign and/or beneficial.

Two examples, one from my work at Birmingham Conservatoire, the other from Magenta:

Once we have persuaded people to let go of their previous habits, and changed the way they are performing something, we need to make sure that they will retain the change as a regular part of how they perform. There are two elements to this part of the process:

• Consolidate and keep moving
• Anchor the changes in the organisational culture

This is the third in a series of posts about using Kotter’s model of organisational change as a way to conceptualise the rehearsal process. Once we have unfrozen people from their entrenched ways, we are ready to make the change. Like the unfreezing process, Kotter breaks this down into three constituent elements:

• Communicate your vision
• Empower people to clear obstacles
• Secure short-term wins

In my last post, I looked at how Kotter’s model of organisational change might relate to rehearsal processes in the broad scale. Today and in my next two posts, I’m going to dig a bit deeper into the detail to garner some clues about not just what needs to happen, but how we can make it happen.

One of the interesting things that happens when amateur musicians build themselves a training infrastructure is that they bring an incredible breadth of skills and knowledge from different walks of professional life and apply them to improving the ways they make music. Thus it was that in the early years of the British Association of Barbershop Singers annual Directors College that Chris Davidson introduced me to John Kotter’s model of how to effect institutional change.

Chris was presenting the ideas in the context of how a director can change a chorus’s culture, working habits and skill levels over periods of weeks and months – and indeed that is the most direct parallel to the changes in businesses that the model was derived from.

But I have been fascinated over the years with how the model might work on the micro-level – to the myriad changes we make each week in rehearsal.

I recently had the pleasure of judging at the pan-European barbershop convention in Veldhoven, Holland. I noticed some interesting things about performance style that led me to reflect on how traditions develop in relationship to their audiences.

The thing that I particularly noticed was the barbershop delivery style that rushes through all the little words in a phrase and draws out all the phrase-end embellishments. (I’ve also written about this from a somewhat different perspective in my first book.) What struck me was the very coherent, or at least consistent, patterns of distortion this approach applied to the music. It reminded me of those dolls that map the density of nerve endings in the human body by enlarging the areas that are more sensitive. So you get a model with huge hands and tongue, and titchy elbows – a very distorted figure, but one that makes sense in its own way.

I was thinking about the process by which a performing tradition produces this kind of consistent distortion, and I think it’s to do with connoisseurship – i.e. a small, specialist audience – and with competition.

The word interpretation has a double usage in music. It refers both to meaning – how a musician understands a piece – and to action – the concrete performance decisions they make.

Of course, these two senses of the word keep collapsing into one another. Listeners only have access to the musician’s concept through the concrete sounds they produce, and the musicians themselves likewise develop their internal representation of a piece through the act learning to produce it physically. The abstract quality of meaning has no real means to exist independently of its realisation.

I spent a goodly chunk of yesterday with current LABBS Quartet champions, Noteorious, for a coaching session on two unremittingly cheerful songs: ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ and ‘Get Happy’. They’re great to work with, because they enter into the imaginative world of what we’re working on so readily. Even if they look like they think I’ve suggested something utterly nonsensical, they jump straight in with both feet and make it work.

Reflecting on our session afterwards, I noticed two interesting things about the process of coaching: