Learning

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.

Sunday afternoon saw hordes of barbershoppers thronging into my erstwhile place of work for the British Association of Barbershop Singers’ annual Quartet Prelims, at which quartets compete to qualify to sing at the annual convention in May. It feels most ungrateful of me, then, to have missed the entire occasion, with so many friends and so much interesting music coming right to my own home patch.

But I spent the day instead just three minutes’ walk away in the city’s glorious new library, leading a workshop with Magenta that involved choir and guests learning a brand new arrangement in a bit less than 3 hours, then performing in the Book Rotunda that lies at the heart of the building. Magenta has offered these workshops every so often over the years, previously as our contribution to Moseley Festival each summer, but this was the first time we’d done one in the city centre with city-wide publicity.

Sunday took me up to Scunthorpe to participate in a Festival of Choirs at the rather wonderful Baths Hall. It was an ambitious day’s music-making, with an afternoon of workshops followed by a combined concert involving nine choirs in the evening. It became clear in conversation that it had also attracted a considerable number of singers who weren’t in the concert choirs along to the workshops (and, I would hope, as audience members). The place was thronged, and had a really lively buzz about it. They were already plotting to repeat the experience next year.

I had been asked to do a workshop on barbershop, running it twice with two different groups. It was an interesting challenge - we had just over an hour in which to both introduce the central elements of the style and get a good amount of meaningful music-making done. It would be all too easy to spend the whole time grappling with notes and words without finding space to put the resultant chords and meanings into context. Equally, it was important that the participants spent a lot more time singing than I did talking.

Or, I should say, the role of jokes in learning. Although I’ve not been out doing comedy gigs in the last handful of months (for various reasons which I’ve shared with my comedy friends, but not blogged about here as they’re tangential at best to my musical life), the things I have learned in that world continue to resonate pleasingly with my core identity as musician and musical facilitator.

Now, I’ve always played for laughs in my teaching, especially with larger groups. And it’s actually much easier to crack jokes successfully in a teaching context than it is in a stand-up comedy context, because you know your audience much better. One thing that going out telling jokes to roomfuls of strangers teaches you is to appreciate it when you come across a room full of people about whom you know a lot in terms of background, interests and cultural referents, if only in the one dimension that brings them all together.

Yes, I know it’s getting a bit self-referential to describe the title of a blog post in that blog post, but my usual approach of using either the ensemble’s name or its location as a starting point was running into difficulties. The adventures were down in Coulsdon, near Croydon, with Surrey Harmony - none of which words alliterate with what we were doing, which was a workshop on Aural Skills for Choral Groups (which does at least have an internal rhyme to its name).

One of the things I have reflected on periodically as a review my workshops and coaching sessions is the different kind of things you can deal with effectively at different stages of process of preparation for performance. When the music isn’t yet very familiar, you haven’t got the familiarity to dig into detail, but conversely, you have the freedom to explore big-picture questions of fundamental musical feel. When you’re getting near to the performance, you don’t want to get people questioning what they’re doing, but instead you want to hone and polish and focus.

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.

Rolf Dobelli’s book The Art of Thinking Clearly includes primacy and recency effects in its catalogue of cognitive errors that can mislead our judgement. We pay too much attention to both our first impressions and our most recent experiences, and tend to neglect what happens in between. Dobelli gives some advice about how we can develop strategies to compensate, but I find myself more interested in considering how we can work with this natural tendency to make it work for us.

There are two main scenarios in which these matter for musicians: rehearsing and performing. In both cases, we need to note that those whose attention we are managing - respectively the musicians learning the music and the audience listening to it - are going to be disproportionately affected by the first and last things that happen to them, and thus this is where our best opportunities to influence them lie.

When I posted a while back on the subject of not messing with pitch, I received the following response from a reader:

I think I must have "a weak sense of tonal centre" but have no idea how to correct that.

And I thought: that sounds like something that could usefully be blogged about.

The first thing to say is possibly ‘correct’ isn’t necessarily the most useful verb - it’s not a binary thing whereby you either have a sense of key or you don’t. It’s a bit like reading music or breath management - however good you are at it, you are always aware that you could be better, but work at improving your skills always pays off.