Conduct with Charisma: Post-Workshop Reflections

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Wednesday 25th January 2012
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What is the collective noun for charismatic directors?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.

Instrument and Character

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Sunday 22nd January 2012
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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.*

How to Prioritise in a Coaching or Teaching Session

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 19th January 2012
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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.

Charisma, Cults and Theoretical Traditions

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Monday 16th January 2012
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My recent posts about the recruitment techniques used by new religious movements and their parallels with choral recruitment practices made an implicit connection between the sociology of religion and the sociology of charisma. I thought it might be useful to make this connection a bit more explicit, but didn’t want to get distracted in the midst of all the choral detail, so the subject has a separate post of its own.

Now, both branches of sociology have a common origin in the work of Max Weber.* But they’ve not been as closely interlinked in the literature (as far as I can see) as you might expect from that. Weber was the first to propose the distinction between church and sect that has informed much of the sociology of new religious movements, but he stopped writing about it once Ernst Troeltsch picked it up and developed it.

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