Soapbox

I’ve been wondering for a while if I’m going to have a rant about this, and it seems the thought won’t go away so here goes. The following graphic has been doing the rounds on social media and it has been irritating me quite disproportionately for what is intended to be a friendly and empathy-inducing little picture.

To start with, let’s acknowledge the psychological truths that it does capture with some success. The red phase says something valid about how resistance to a task is proportionate to its demands on your brain’s background-processing functions. The things that are the hardest to start are the ones that, once embarked upon, will invade your dreams. And the flurry of work up to the deadline reminds us about the end-effect, and the way it so helpfully refreshes attention as we head into the finish line.

Every so often, you hear someone articulate the idea that ‘So-and-so is a very good director, but their choir isn’t very good’. And when I hear this, my brain goes into melt-down at the sheer invalidity of this concept. The only measure of a conductor’s quality is the standard of performances they elicit from the musicians they work with. If your ensemble isn’t very good, it’s because the director isn’t very good.

Okay, so there are some caveats here. I anticipate your objections.

The raw material makes a difference. A director who is working with novices will not, from a standing start, produce results as good as one working with experienced musicians. This is particularly true of instrumental groups, but also a fair generalisation for singers. You’d expect auditioned choirs to achieve more than non-auditioned, as they have filtered out all the people who lack whichever set of skills you test for at audition.

I have written several times over the years about how ‘talent’ is a socially constructed narrative, and about the obsessive, dedicated work that goes into creating the skills that get labelled as ‘talent’. What I have been hitherto somewhat muted about is the damage that the mythology of talent does to our culture, and to individuals within it. This has come into focus for me in recent months as I have been writing about the phenomenon of the ‘non-singer’ as part of a book chapter for Oxford University Press.

The ‘non-singer’ is the inevitable by-product of our cultural construction of talent. We approach talent with a kind of magical thinking that sees the capacity for music (or indeed for all kinds of other specialist activities) as somehow both genetic and supernaturally bestowed upon particular, ‘gifted’ people, who are thereby set apart from normal mortals.

I once knew a singer who had spent some years working as an organ builder and harpsichord finisher. He had a pretty reliable sense of pitch - as in the kind of pitch memory that often gets labelled as 'perfect pitch', but appears in many musicians in a somewhat imperfect form. That is, perfect enough for practical purposes - if you wanted to sing something in the right key but had no fixed-pitch instrument to hand, he'd usually be able to set you right.

But if he'd been doing a lot of tuning of keyboards recently, he lost the knack. He reported that constantly tweaking up and down confused his internal gauge for pitch and he had to revert to external prompts again until it settled down.

A while back I had a conversation with a relatively new director - not a complete novice, but still feeling like she was in the learning phase of the role - about music preparation. It emerged that she did not feel the need to learn to sing all the parts prior to directing a piece - whereas I had taken this for granted as something you'd do as a matter of course.

Whether or not I persuaded her of the rightness of my position (which, as you will see, I still uphold), it was an interesting conversation as it made me question things I took for granted and work out why I took the position I did. So I thought it worth recapping here. It is, after all, a practical question that affects every choral director.

I've written a couple of times over the years about asking for feedback - at what stage(s) it is most useful to do so, and how to manage one's own emotions so as to get the best value out of it. But it's also worth considering how to give feedback. This is something we work hard at in Magenta, with very clear protocols, because while (nearly) all feedback is meant well, it makes a huge difference how it is done.

Unless your intention is to deliver a fatal blow to somebody's confidence, bear the following points in mind.

Regular readers will be familiar with this theme from previous occasions when I have climbed up onto my soapbox, such as here), or more helpfully and less rantingly, here. So you know the general point already: if people insist on using parrot-fashion as a primary learning method, you can't be surprised if you end up with a choir of bird-brains. Follow the links for the reasoning, we don't need to repeat it all again.

Instead I am going to share with you a penny-drop moment I had when in recent dialogue with some proponents of the Kodály method. For those who are not very familiar with their approach, it is all about building musicianship. A combination of singing and clapping and gestural vocabulary helps build a robust inner musical landscape that acts as a foundation for all other musical activity. It's good stuff.

I recently received a letter from one of my city's fabulous arts organisations about a major musical event planned for 2014. I am going to have a grump in a minute, but it's not about the general wonderfulness of this organisation or the specific value of this project, which looks genuinely artistically exciting. The letter was inviting me to a meeting to learn how choirs from across the city could participate.

Now, maybe I am just feeling jaded because I live in a city that has a lot of great arts organisations, and so I get a lot of these invitations, but they are starting to irritate me, and I have taken a little time to work out why. On the face of it, what could be wrong with the chance to join up with other people with whom we have artistic interests in common to make a special event happen? Massed voice events are inherently exciting, and it's good for our sense of civic community to do stuff together.

But the thing is this: these are high-profile events, run by funded organisations, but effectively subsidised by the unfunded community groups upon which they rely for participants.