January 2012

One of the things we talked about in last week’s ‘Conduct with Charisma’ workshop was the idea of ‘communion’. This is the particular form of social bonding identified by sociologist Raymond Bradley in charismatic groups whereby all members bond with all other members. This sets up the free-flow of affection and fraternal love that is experienced as a state of euphoria or exaltation.

We identified a number of different activities and structures you can set up within a choir that will either promote or inhibit the building of these bonds. These included social events (particularly those in shared social spaces, and in which the director schmoozes widely, not just hanging out with the same people each time), changing rehearsal layout/groupings so that people stand with and sing with different people, and a culture of knowing and using each others’ names.

Well, the day after the workshop, Chris Rowbury published a post over on From the Front of the Choir on why he doesn’t get people to introduce themselves at workshops until after they’ve had a good sing together. And it is a textbook example of practices that promote communion.

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.*

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.

I recently read Robin Stuart-Kotze’s book Performance: The Secrets of Successful Behaviour. I picked it up wondering if it was going to be one of the business-management genre books that have been feeding into my charisma project. Not directly, it turns out, and where it does, mostly by contrast. Nonetheless, it proved a stimulating read, both in the dimensions in which I found myself persuaded, and in those where I found myself wanting to argue back. (Possibly that is the definition of a stimulating book!)

Anyway, one of the areas I found particularly useful was where he discusses performance-blocking behaviours – i.e. those habits and forms of interaction that actively prevent people from doing well. The problem with these is not just that they are counter-productive, but also that they are highly contagious. So one person’s blocking behaviours very quickly inspire similarly unhelpful habits in others.

Back before Christmas, Tom Carter came over here and engaged in some really productive debate in response to my post on Stanislavski and Schenker. (Joke on me: I had wondered whether it was going to be an excessively obscure subject, but got probably the most response I’ve had for ages. Shows the limits of my predictive power!) This post is a follow-up to a couple of loose ends that got left dangling.

First, Tom asked:

So, could you talk more about the performances you experienced in which the singers identified local objectives without integrating them into a super-objective? Or those in which they had detail but missed on the global?