Musical Identity

The title of this post is the subject line of an email I received recently from a friend who is grappling with the question of how to inveigle visitors to/potential members of her chorus to return and become actual members. This is a question that all choirs face, but it is exacerbated in this case because it is a group whose members are spread over a wide geographical distance, and who only meet once a month. So the opportunities for people to 'go off the boil' (as my correspondent put it) are significantly higher than for those choirs that meet weekly.

What they do so far is to 'pamper while they are at rehearsal, follow up once or twice between rehearsal (designated officer does this).' What they don't do is issue any music or learning materials until people are paid-up members, and the email implied that not being able to practise was a significant obstacle to ignition.

There are thus two distinct but related issues lurking in here: how to keep people's enthusiasm between rehearsals, and the pragmatics of giving out chorus property.

A ritual is a habit with meaning. Choirs have all kinds of habits: some good (clearing the chairs away after rehearsal), some bad (sneaking breaths in obvious places mid-phrase), some cultivated deliberately (smiling while singing), some developed by osmosis (going to the pub after a concert).

But a ritual is something both done deliberately and freighted with a specific import. It shares with habits that quality of repeated action, but it has a sense of self-awareness, of being invested with significance beyond itself. It functions to bind those participating in it together into a shared identity rooted in shared experiences. It will either implicitly embody or explicitly articulate some aspect of the choir’s values.

Sweet Adelines were back in Birmingham at the weekend for the second year running for their annual convention at Symphony Hall. I commented last year about how the region’s healthy state is clearly audible in the quality of the performances they are producing, but this year’s contests were a clear step up from there.

The quartet contest was hotly contested, with a strong field of well-established quartets and experienced quartet singers dominating the top ten places. Gold medallists Echo, for example, were only in their second year as a quartet, but have the experience of two previous gold medallists within the line-up, while the second and third place quartets, Miss-Demeanour and Fortuity are the 2010 and 2011 LABBS champions respectively.

Saturday saw 160 singers from 15 LABBS choruses travel from around the South-East of England to Little Chalfont in Buckinghamshire for the third of four education days LABBS held during April. Much of the day was spent with the singers forming a monster-sized chorus under the direction of Amersham A Cappella's director, Helen Lappert with coaching from representatives of each of the barbershop judging categories, interspersed with break-out sessions in smaller groups.

I was there as the representative of the Music Category, although my break-out session, as you will know if you saw my last post, was more intended for the Human Being Category.

The format of the day was quite standard for these kinds of events, and I was thinking on the way home about what makes it so effective.

There was an interesting discussion in the LinkedIn Choral Enthusiasts group last week about how many singers it takes to make a choir. It was started by ChoralNet stalwart, Philip Tolley, who articulated the question thus:

What is the minimum number of singers that constitute a choir - is it 2 voices per part (depending on the number of parts) or is it 9 singers as anything under already has a name (Octet, trio, etc)?

I found the discussion interesting because, on the face of it, you'd think it was a simple question. Some ensembles are clearly chamber ensembles, and some are clearly larger bodies of singers, and it's to the latter that we'd usually apply the term 'choir'. But it's harder than you'd think to define a numerical value to where one becomes the other.

So, having considered some of the central elements of people’s stories of how they came to be dedicated to their thing to the point of monomania, it’s time to think about what implications these elements have for us in our roles as teachers and/or choir leaders. There’s no thrill like it for an educator to spark someone into brilliance (both for us and for them), so what can we do maximise our chances?

First, we need to recognise that a lot of it is out of our hands. We can’t force it to happen, since it is essentially about the learner’s decision identify with the activity. Moreover, since there are a limited number of things at which you can be obsessively brilliant at once, it’s clear that not everyone is going to pick my thing to obsess about. That’s fine. That clarifies our job as being (a) to enable cheerful competence for those who are ignited by something else and (b) to be ready to meet the needs of those who fall in love with our thing.

I have been thinking quite a lot recently about what Dan Coyle refers to as ‘ignition’ – the spark that motivates that obsessive, deep engagement with a subject or activity that leads to the development of expertise. Ten thousand hours is a huge amount of time to dedicate to something, and if you only give your attention to it during the formal or dutiful parts of learning you’re not going to clock up enough experience to get beyond mere competence. Going to your lessons and doing your practice isn’t enough: you also need to squander great big chunks of your life on it.

Further to my comments earlier this week on power-sharing in a choral context: between scheduling that post and its publication, I had an interesting experience with Magenta that got us all reflecting about these questions in more detail. The occasion was the Adult Choirs class at the Worcester Festival, and the experience was receiving feedback from the adjudicator, David Lawson. (The photo will give you a hint, in case you are interested, as to how we got on.)

The specific comment that David made was (and this is as near verbatim as I can get – I neglected to make a note until later):

I always say to my choir at school that, ‘Choir is not a democracy’. Now, I saw that you had somebody giving the notes and bringing you in, but I wondered whether you are actually getting dangerously near a democracy?

The big joke within Magenta afterwards was that everybody’s immediate instinct was to look at me to see what the correct answer was.