I have just finished a run of four weekends with seven choir concerts for five choirs. Add in singing at maybe eight masses, many rehearsals and dress rehearsals, two auditions and two voice lessons over the same period and you can get a feel for how much singing a get to do nowadays. And I am so lucky – I show up to most rehearsals fresh, and when I look around the room I see people exhausted after their day of work and struggling to enjoy themselves.
This is the end of concert season, and now most groups have a break until September. The other busy time is November, and then a smaller peak in March. One opportunity the choirs have to learn from each other is that they could increase their audiences by performing when others don’t. I have long thought there is a market for a summer choir in NYC. Another one could perform in, say, October, January and April with a cabaret at the end of June. The October concert could use works they knew already or were simpler to learn, to compensate for a shorter rehearsal cycle. Instead, everyone seems to follow the obvious pattern.
I am someone who enjoys rehearsal nights almost as much as concerts. Concert days tend to be long and involve a lot of sitting about. The day I always hate most is the one following a concert, because the day always feels empty, somehow lacking direction. So today could be called by black Monday, the first after the season end. Black Monday for most is the last Monday in January before pay day, when the weather is awful, the work is piling up and the credit card bills have landed with a thud. But I did wonder if others had the same feeling immediately after an adrenaline rush, and that such times make people susceptible to depression or even suicide – that could be helpful to know.
My groups are all different from each other. They are large and small, semi-professional and amateur, joyous and serious, groups where I am one of the best singers and ones where I am just a journeyman, groups where I am one of the youngest to almost the oldest. I can learn from all of them and take enjoyment from all of them in different ways. I could characterize the five groups as specialist, community, friends, fresh and eclectic.
I was thinking today about what the choirs might be able to learn from each other, and how that might apply in business or other endeavours. The most important lesson is that each group finds a success in its own way, with its own guiding principles. It seems that having a core purpose and values, written down or not, offers a way to sustain. Then each group emphasises its strengths rather than trying to address its weaknesses. They don’t try to become something they are not, but to become even better at what they already are.
That is a good lesson in business and personal development too. I have always found it odd that annual appraisals focus so much on weaknesses. They would be far more effective if they helped us build up our strengths. Businesses also need to choose leaders who fit their values, which may why importing from outside does not always work, despite the obvious benefits of adding new perspectives. One of my choirs will be searching for a new conductor this fall, and it is the one with the least distinct personality. They need to think hard about the appointment.
Staying with the leaders, they are also all motivated by different things, but they also know their strengths and emphasise them. A common factor in arts is that the money is something that barely motivates them at all. So long as they are not insulted and are paid within the expectations of their place in the hierarchy, they are happy to work for very little and indeed spend their own money to improve the performances. Professional pride and development, empathy and friendship, challenge, and service to singers and a community all matter a lot more to them than cash. And, I suspect, that is true for most of us, unless we work in an industry where greed is the whole point like finance.
I also thought about my own performance in all these concerts. Some very strange things happen. If I feel nervous, or exposed, or somehow unworthy, or if the group somehow collectively senses one of those things, then my breathing becomes unreliable, I start making mistakes and I find it hard to do more than get through a piece, relying on technique and tricks. But sometimes the opposite happens. I find breath control I never had during rehearsals, my voice can soar and feel more controlled, and I can somehow feel attuned to everything going on around me, almost out of my own body. I guess that must be adrenaline or something like it. It is wonderful when it happens. I only wish it would happen more often.
This has obvious parallels in sports and in work generally, especially teamwork. Confidence matters so much, and a good coach or leader knows how to transmit confidence to others. A good conductor knows that almost nothing else matters on a performance day – their role is to send us on stage feeling confident and to maintain that during performance. It also helps to know that we have that magic overdrive gear somewhere inside us, that level of serenity that can produce minor miracles. We need tricks to escape from poor to adequate, then confidence to move from adequate to good, then something special to move beyond good.
This serenity is more than just confidence – in fact overconfidence can be damaging, for as soon as I shift focus from the present and start thinking about the end of the piece or about the next piece or start preening myself then everything collapses. When I used to play competitive bridge, the same thing happened. When things were going really well, I could make the mistake of imagining winning the tournament – at which point everything immediately went pear-shaped.
The World Cup starts this week. I hope there are good matches on view in the US, despite my only receiving only FOX sports channel and the US failing to qualify. What we will see will be a few individuals and maybe one or two teams who manage to pitch their emotional readiness just right – confident, prepared, serene out of their bodies but still laser focused, never ahead of themselves – and hopefully we can see some miracles. We’ll see some other teams, just as talented, who get it wrong. Coaching matters. And it starts with confidence.
The serenity might also explain another factor I’ve noticed in concerts. Most years, the most memorable concert I attend is performed by amateurs, not professionals. Sure, the pros mess up a lot less and show off their skills, but they rarely scale the heights, perhaps because they are too complacent and giving enough to justify a pay check and no more. There was a TENET Monteverdi concert a couple of years that proved an exception – I wonder how the conductor and the group achieved a passion usually only available to amateurs.
I learned a couple of other things, or maybe learned again a couple of things that were obvious already. I can sing solos, but I am not a soloist. It is great to stretch myself, but also good to know my limits. And audiences love a big finish – all the strongest reactions came from the fortissimo thrilling endings. Those of us who snobbishly think we know better should recall such simple lessons – and reward conductors who know them too.
So, Black Monday is nearly over. Writing a blog about it was a good way to get through the day. And, as so often, one part of life can offer lessons to the other parts. We don’t learn enough. For all their brilliance and abiding strengths, each of my choirs could benefit from observing and learning from all the others. One is fantastic at social media, another programming, a third utilises its community, they all have something can could be easily transferred to the others.
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