After writing my post last week about the way the intermittent responses you get as a performer play a key role in creating the desire to repeat the experience, I had a penny-drop moment about that whole psychological dynamic. We’re used to thinking about it in terms of its problem dimension – those addictions that get in the way of life, such as gambling or computer Solitaire.

But it struck me that these problems aren’t the norm for this kind of operant conditioning, merely some unfortunate side-effects. The difficulty isn’t the psychological effect of intermittent reinforcement, it’s when it occurs in overly simple contexts in which you have little control over the outcomes.

Let me explain.

Saturday saw me back with my friends Fascinating Rhythm to work with them on David Wright’s arrangement of ‘South Rampart Street Parade’. It is a classic chart for reasons that I came away with a renewed appreciation for, and it is a good choice for them at their current stage of development: they have to raise their game to sing it, but it is a challenge within their reach. And it has that wonderful characteristic that, tricky as it is, it lifts performers – it actually helps them out-perform what they previously thought they were capable of.

Magenta engaging in addictive behaviourAs I have mentioned before, taking an evening class in stand-up comedy has given me some interesting new perspectives on the act of performance. Some of what we’ve been learning is specific to the art-form*, but I am also getting reasonably frequent penny-drop moments when something suddenly sheds a new and illuminating light into my regular life of music and musicians, often bringing some half-understood dynamic into startling focus.

One such moment was during a discussion between course tutor James Cook and visiting comedian, Andy Robinson on what provides the impetus to keep going, especially if you’ve had a bad gig.

In my last post on this subject, the question emerged as to what kind of overlap there is between activities/approaches that generate a flow state with activities/approaches that generate a charismatic encounter. I’m thinking particularly of the choral rehearsal here, since that’s the primary context in which I’m likely to apply these ideas – though if we learn more generalisable things in the process, that’s fine too.

Now, for all the structural and experiential resonances between these two states, theorising their overlap has been trickier than I expected. This is partly because there is one huge apparent contradiction between the two. A key element to Flow is the sense of personal control, that what you are doing makes a defining difference to the outcome of the activity. Whereas, a key element of a charismatic encounter is the way people hand over their sense of executive control to the leader.

Every so often you come across a study that sheds so much light on a field that you don’t understand why it’s not more widely cited. Raymond Bradley’s The Social Structure of Charisma of 1987 is such a book – it manages to be both deeply rooted in the Weberian theoretical tradition and strikingly original in its contribution to the field. (I feel it over-reaches itself theoretically a bit towards the end, but then ground-breaking studies often do have cracks in them, and that’s no reason to disregard what they do achieve.)

However, I recently came across a Masters dissertation by Dushyant Singh that builds on Bradley’s work to theorise not only the ways in which Al Qaeda is a charismatic organisation, but how security forces might use these ideas to damp down the charismatic effect in order to reduce its violence. Fascinating stuff, but not primarily why I’m mentioning it here.

Tuesday evening took me to Peterborough to work with Rhapsody Chorus and their director Helen Glavina. Their choice of repertoire for the evening was driven by the programme for their BBC Choir of the Year audition tomorrow (good luck!), but my remit for the evening was to help Helen refine and develop her directing technique. It is a supreme act of trust for a director to allow her technique to be dissected in front of her singers, but for those who take that leap, there are some immense benefits that can’t be achieved any other way.

I spent Sunday afternoon with NoteOrious working with them on a new medley which I had arranged for them last year. (One of the challenges of writing this post is going to be making musically useful comments that make sense without naming the songs involved, as I don’t want to steal their thunder for when they want unleash it on an unsuspecting world.)

But it was a great moment in its development to work on it – they know it well enough that memory issues were infrequent and transient, but it’s not yet been so rehearsed that it becomes difficult to make changes. Indeed, it struck me that their depth of experience as a quartet shows as much in their capacity to respond quickly to coaching input and retain the changes as in their well-developed performance skills. They have become adept at making effective use of their coaching time.

Daniel Coyle has a nice post over on the blog associated with his book The Talent Code about practice gadgets. These are cheap and simple tools and tricks that make whatever skill you are practising harder in quite specific ways so that you have to do your thing better. He gives the example of a neighbour who practises basketball wearing goggles with the lower half blacked out so he can’t see his feet. CPE Bach recommended practising the keyboard in the dark for the same kinds of reasons.