Personal Development

Second in a series that starts here

Our conducting gestures are only ever as expressive as the musical thoughts that generate them. So the place to start in refining and developing our gestures is to work on what is inside our heads. Which sounds a rather abstract thing to do, so here are some specific activities that will service that aim.

My previous two posts on this theme considered the scenario of a young, skilled musician taking on the role of director for the first time with an established choir, and, respectively, the challenges they are likely to face, and the advantages they are likely to wield. This last post in the series looks a bit wider to the dangers the category ‘young and talented’ presents to those it is applied to in general, as well as how this plays out the specific scenario of the new director.

Talent, as I have discussed before, is a mythological category. Our culture largely regards it as an inborn, innate quality, an assumption for which the literature on expertise can find no basis. Depth of skill emerges from the quantity and quality of practise someone undertakes; capacity follows rather than precedes the activity.

But, because the mythology of talent is so ubiquitous, people still use it to describe the facts of aptitude that they observe. Henry Kingsbury describes how it thus becomes a socially-negotiated label: those with authority bestow it upon junior members of that social world, giving them permission to consider themselves as particularly and specially endowed. This label can then prove a useful motivator for continued engagement: a child who is led to believe they have a special capacity for something is arguably less likely to give it up.

Having picked over some of the hurdles that face the sprightly new director when they take up their first post with an older choir in my last post, it occurred to me that there are also some advantages to this situation that it is worth pointing out. It may seem redundant to tell someone why they are fortunate to be both youthful and skilled, but when you are struggling against the twin obstacles of inexperience and condescension, it doesn’t necessarily feel as enviable as outsiders assume.

But there is a specific advantage that any new director has, and which is amplified significantly by both the qualities of relative youth and high skill. Your very existence bounces people out of their comfort zones.

There’s a scenario that happens frequently enough that it is possible to generalise about: a well-established choir acquiring a ‘young and talented’, but relatively inexperienced director. I put the ‘young and talented’ in scare quotes, as that’s how the director is usually described by the choir, but may not be how I would put it.

The dimension of youth is generally quite clear (though possibly not quite as purely objective as you might think - the perception of juniority can be magnified or diminished by other factors such as gender and class). But the concept of ‘talent’, as regular readers will know, is open to critique - it is a concept that mythologises the products of dedication as innate rather than hard-won.

We got ready for the new year by considering what my father used to call the ‘too-hard tray’ - that collection of things that we look at, think, ‘eek!’ and get very busy doing something else very useful in the hope that the sense of virtue will drown out the feeling of being daunted. Corralling our demons into a specified place is a good first step to facing them properly, but does not in itself do anything more than acknowledge that they are there.

Sooner or later, that is, you have to do something about the stuff in the too-hard tray.

You may think that my spending time writing this post is itself a displacement activity, and that I am addressing this question rather than getting on with those things which are currently intimidating me. It would be a fair conclusion to draw.

But, in fact, on this occasion I am actually allowing myself the indulgence of doing some writing (something I am not - currently - scared of) as a reward for having made some progress with the too-hard tray earlier this morning. Take that, Demons!

I have been thinking quite a lot about this recently, mostly in the context of helping directors develop, but - as so often happens in this endeavour - the thoughts spread easily beyond the specialist field of choral music out into all kinds of corners of Real Life. Ensemble musicianship is, after all, about working with human beings.

And, in much the same way that people who train to become counsellors and therapists themselves have to undergo counselling and therapy, educators can’t go very long thinking about the people whose development they are supporting without stopping to consider their own progress. Hence the funny mix of naval-gazing and advice that sometimes emerges...

So, as directors (and in our various other roles in life), we all have areas where we are reasonably confident and secure. We also have areas that we are a bit scared of, that we fear we are not as strong in as we should be. We may try not to think about them too much, which means we remain a bit hazy about exactly what it is we feel inadequate about, but the awareness of it lurks at the back of our minds, ready to assail us in the dead of night whenever things go a bit wobbly.

Frustration is the enemy of progress.

If you enjoy irony, you will be pleased to know that immediately after I wrote that first sentence, my laptop froze and stopped responding for five minutes. I had the presence of mind to remain patient, though if I had been writing on pretty much any other subject, I may not have done.

That feeling of being thwarted by the universe is one that periodically visits anyone who tries to get stuff done. It is an unpleasant experience: you feel all snarled up, putting in the effort but failing to get the results you feel those efforts deserve. You feel disempowered and outraged. It’s not just that you feel stuck, you feel that is unreasonable to be stuck.

In my recent post on goal-setting for the year, I mentioned 'doing things that expand my boundaries'. This is one of those ideas that is very clear in my mind, but turns out to be quite abstract when I try to articulate it. It is related to going out of your comfort zone, or that wonderful notion developed in Saki's short story of an 'unrest cure'.

The point is to extend oneself - in both the sense of to make an effort and to enlarge. The idea emerged over some years from observing the contraction of older relatives - how as they reduced their spheres of activity, capacities and interests reduced too. Of course the slowing with age is ultimately inevitable, but it seemed to me that the quality of lived experience is different when people choose to live safely within their limits all the time as opposed to when they challenge those limits periodically.