Charisma

In one of the comments to my recent post on becoming a director, Lynne alluded to that sense of 'not feeling like a proper director'. I am sure lots of other people will sympathise with her - either feeling like that now, or having felt like that in the past - and I thought it was worth spending a little time to reflect on that experience, why it happens, and what we can do about it.

The feeling that you're in a position that is not entirely deserved, that you are winging it by the seat of your pants, and the fear that you will be found out has a name. It is called 'Impostor Syndrome', and it is quite well documented in all kinds of professional scenarios. It helps, I feel, simply to know this is normal.

This is a difficult post to write, and I don't know how it is going to turn out. But it has been brewing for some months as the cherished institutions of specialist music education in the UK are engulfed in successive waves of scandal. I am, personally, among the numbers of neither the abused nor the abusers, but have friends and colleagues in both camps, and have had much to come to terms with recently.

Part of the shock of the whole process has been asking: why didn't we know this before? And the conversations between those who lived through the 1980s in these schools and colleges have shown that, well, we did know, kind of, but we didn't know how to articulate what we knew. It was a different version of what Betty Friedan called The Problem with No Name.

As I threatened in my recent post in which I had a somewhat tangential rant arising from Deke Sharon's defence of imperfection, I have also had some thoughts about his central point, that a cappella has become too obsessed with tuning.

Now, this plugs into well-established discourses of musical taste, which I have written about before. The unfinished, the unpolished acts as a signifier of honesty and authenticity. A perfectly-schooled facial expression and impeccable etiquette can hide secret thoughts - it may be diplomatic, but is it to be trusted?

Saturday saw choral directors from around the UK brave the winds the floods of the previous few days to come to Birmingham for the second iteration of my Conduct with Charisma workshop. As I remarked after the last one, this kind of event brings with it that wonderful ensemble quality that you learn things together that you wouldn't learn exploring the subject by yourself. Filtering the material through the different perspectives, backgrounds and assumptions that the different participants bring with them gives everyone a rounder and more nuanced understanding than would otherwise be available. The social dimension of learning is about what you can learn as well as how

I have quipped before that when testing out ideas to do with charisma, a basic acid test is to check if they work for both Hitler and Jesus. This sounds like a frivolous way of doing things, but it actually works quite well, because it takes two major figures whose stories are well known (and therefore easily accessible for thought experiments), but operating with very different moral frameworks.

A recent article in the BBC online News Magazine (written as a trailer for a BBC2 documentary series) gives a good framework for demonstrating this. It’s an account by historian Laurence Rees of the factors that led to Hitler’s popularity as a leader, intended as a cautionary tale for countries going through economic turmoil today. Its basic premise is that Hitler was unlikely leader - seen in his younger days as something of an oddball - but that a combination of circumstance and strategy propelled him into an astonishingly powerful position.

The conducting literature has a somewhat uncertain relationship with the concept of charisma. It is a quality that is in many ways central to the maestro myth, but actual conductors writing about their craft show a degree of mistrust about it. Charisma can be seen to be tricksy, manipulative, or a worrying tendency to 'believe your own bullshit'.*

There are three elements in particular that quite reasonably arouse mistrust:

• The hijacking of the executive function: one of the more disturbing studies on the neurology of charisma showed how, when people believe they are in the presence of a charismatic leader, they suppress the use of their critical faculties in a manner akin to hypnosis
• The potential for tyranny: the need for strong top-down control to keep the emotional energies in charismatic groups from breaking the group apart concentrates a lot of power in the leader’s hands
• Charisma’s inherently expansionist agenda: charismatic groups are inherently proselytising - they set themselves up against the mainstream, and then seek converts. They are not, therefore, necessarily very comfortable neighbours

One of the primary themes of the sociological study of charismatic power is that you need to understand it as a relationship. It's not just about the colourful leader, it's about the interaction between that authority figure and the group that follows them. Indeed, the way you can identify charisma is not by looking at the attributes of the individual in isolation, but by looking at the effect they have on the collective. Charisma is about the encounter - it's not something you can do alone.

However, the group is not itself a simple entity. At the moment of a particular encounter, there may be clear sense of group coherence, generated by the experience of communion by all who are present. (I'm thinking, for example, of a choral rehearsal here.) But for a charismatic leader to have influence that lasts beyond the duration of a single encounter, and that affects more people than they are with in the room at any one time, the notion of 'collective' separates out into a number of concentric layers.

The F-formationAs I mentioned a few months ago, my recent adventures in stand-up comedy have been giving me all kinds of new insights into the performance-audience dynamic. Some of the experiences are no doubt peculiar (in both senses) to the genre, but at the same time they shed light onto things I had previously half-analysed but not fully understood.

Heckling is pretty firmly in the category of ‘peculiar to stand-up’. Indeed, if you are short of things to entertain you on a long train journey, I can recommend speculating about what form a heckle might take at a recital of Mozart piano sonatas. (That thought lasted me halfway from Durham to Darlington.)

But sitting towards the back of a crowded room at the comedy night at my local pub, I learned all kinds of things about audience-performer relationships from a rather drunk person who was determined to join in.