August 2012

The morning after the Olympics I heard a conversation on the radio about national and regional identities. It wandered through whether it was positive or divisive for people to be saying things like 'If Yorkshire were a country, we'd be 7th on the medal table', past how John Lennon's 'Imagine there's no countries' throws the whole concept of the Olympic Games in disarray, and ended with the cheering thought that, 'When the Martians land, that's when we can reasonably be separatist.'

The notion it developed without really naming was that of identities as nested. British people do this a lot as a matter of course: depending on context I may say that I'm British or I may say that I'm English. I've moved around enough that I don't tend to identify with a smaller granular level than that, though if I were a Yorkshirewoman or a Scouser I might carry that identification with me even as I moved round the country: it's clear that some regions and cities have a stronger tribal pull than others.

We do this in music all the time too of course.

Wednesday took me down to Windsor to work current BABS silver medallists, The Royal Harmonics. I have arranged for them several times in recent years, but this was the first time we had made music together in person - indeed, it was also the first time I heard two of my arrangements sung live.

Part of the evening's agenda was to work on the most recent of my arrangements they had commissioned, and it was at that perfect point in the rehearsal process to coach where the singers were secure enough on it not to be wasting mental effort on memory tasks, but still fresh enough on it to be very flexible in adapting their performance.

In the Diamond Jubilee concert at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod, Lesley Garrett introduced the line-up of herself, violinist Nicola Benedetti, trumpeter Alison Balsom and conductor Sian Edwards as ‘classical girl power’. I found myself simultaneously cheered at this list of soloists and wistful that it should still be a matter of remark. ‘Girl Power’ is after all one of those odd phrases that encapsulates optimism and defeatism at the same time.

However, the concert was a very interesting case-study in different solutions to the presentational questions female musicians need to address in their roles as public figures. As I have written about before, there are competing imperatives between the ideologies of classical music that render the musician invisible to ‘let the music speak for itself’ and the general cultural expectation that the female body will be on display, subject to public gaze.

It is a feature of charismatic leaders that they are most famously depicted surrounded by crowds. Hitler addressing his rallies, Jesus feeding the five thousand: one of the ways we recognise charismatic authority is by its power to galvanise large groups.

But I have been thinking recently about how the large groups themselves may be part of the dynamic that generates the charismatic encounter. If we consider Raymond Bradley's conception of charisma as a property that emerges from a group with a particular set of beliefs and relational structures that attribute the extraordinary powers to a particular person or social position, it seems that the crowd is as important as the leader in creating the experience.

I have been thinking about this in particular in relation to the phenomenon of massed-choir events. These may be a feature of festivals, of civic events, or as one of the commercial ventures that have sprung up in recent years that offer participants local preparation over a number of weeks leading up to a concert in a major venue. If you lead a choir, you will get reasonably regular invitations to bring your singers along to participate in these.