Every so often I like to baffle myself with philosophical questions, such as:

Is it possible to have moral integrity without intellectual integrity?

We’re not going to explore that one today, but I offer it to you in case you enjoy this kind of thing too.

Today’s question is possibly less abstract (in the way it is expressed, at any rate, if not in consequence):

Is it possible to be musical, but lack musicianship, and vice versa?

(Spoiler alert. I think the answer to both may end up as: to an extent, but not entirely.)

When I was learning to drive, my father gave me the advice that you shouldn’t rely on other cars’ indicators to work out what they were going to do, but instead take note of their road position and speed. It’s quite possible for someone to have failed to cancel their indicator, or for them to think they are using it, but the bulb has gone, and if you rely on that misleading information to make decisions, you could cause an accident. So, he taught me, make your judgements about what other drivers are likely to do by seeing how they’re driving, and look at the indicators for confirmation. Likewise, drive in such a way that other drivers can tell what you’re going to do.

Much the same principle, historically, applies to dynamic markings in music. Musical shape (texture, harmony, voicing, contour) tells you a lot about how you should perform the music if you attend to it. Rose Rosengard Subotnik wrote about the proliferation of sforzandi in Beethoven’s music as indicating a ‘loss of semiotic certainty’, reflecting a need to add extra, paramusical information about the ‘how’ through a fear that it would not otherwise be played as it should be. Those 19th- and 20th-century editors who littered older music with extra layers of instructions likewise seem to evince a mistrust of performers’ judgement.

Traditionally, conductors in the UK had very little training in actual conducting. The general belief was that being an outstanding musician was the prerequisite, and that those who were truly outstanding would rise into the profession by magic. (What in fact of course happened was that those with egos big enough to believe they were that special volunteered and learned on the job, while the more self-deprecating musicians let them get on with it.)

These days there is rather more opportunity actually to learn some conducting technique, which has to be good for the musical life of the country. (Though the infrastructure is still nothing like as developed as it is either in the US or northern Europe.)

But the old approach did at least have something useful to recommend it: the insistence that the central skill of conducting was in musicianship. Conductors were people with advanced training as instrumental performers and/or composers, which had necessarily entailed in-depth study of the stuff of music. They may have come to stick technique comparatively late, but had the foundation of aural, harmonic and rhythmic skills already built in.

The power dynamics of choral directing is a significant theme in my second book, which I explored using Foucault’s ideas of discipline and surveillance. It is a subject I have been mulling over again recently, in the light of a comment from Mark on my post about non-musical things choir members can do to transform their choir. Mark expressed a not unreasonable wish that directors would offer a quid pro quo of courtesy towards their singers.

There are interesting things to be explored here about the social contract of the choral rehearsal, but the thing that leapt out at me first from Mark’s words was the depth of feeling behind them. Directors have such a power to affect the experience and emotional state of the people they conduct, and I am not sure that we always remember this.

A conversation with a director I had been doing some mentoring work with recently got me thinking about the question of the circumstances in which a director should draw a line in the sand. Metaphorically, that is. The only circumstance I can think of when you might need to do that literally would be if you were rehearsing on a desert island and didn’t have any manuscript paper.

The circumstance the director was dealing with was a singer who had a medical condition that was manifesting in ways that interrupted both rehearsals and performances. It was potentially treatable, but she wasn’t at that point engaging with the treatment, which in the first instance did rather diminish the sympathy I felt.

As I left the house on Saturday to attend the West Midlands Green Party Regional Conference, Jonathan asked if I wanted to take the camera. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘This isn’t the kind of event I’ll be blogging about - just too far removed from music.’ I regretted this cavalier assumption about halfway through the afternoon, when it dawned upon me what a wonderful case study of a charismatic organisation was operating around me.

Around this time last year, I had thought the Green Party as rather interesting as an organisation that should be charismatic, but was not. Or possibly, was no longer. My father had been a member back in the 1980s when it was still called The Ecology Party, and as far as I can recall looking back to that era (I was at an age not to pay a great deal of attention to politics), it had what I now recognise as some of the classic hallmarks.

When people commission an arrangement, sometimes they don’t want me to hear it until they’ve got it performance-ready. Other times, people like to me to come and work with them on it, presumably on the grounds that that way they get a coach who will is guaranteed to have already spent some time thinking about how the music should go. (And actually, that’s a good way of holding me accountable - I write nothing for others to sing that I wouldn’t be prepared to help them with if they needed it.)

Amersham A Cappella took the latter approach with the contest up-tune they have commissioned for this year’s Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention.* And they got me in right at the start of the process, at the point where everyone basically knew the song, but they hadn’t practised anything into an unbreakable habit yet. So, we could get right in there and build both the overall concept/characterisation, and get some of the expressive details that will bring it alive identified from the get-go.

I have written on a number of occasions about that phenomenon whereby people practise/rehearse most diligently, but don’t seem to get significantly better. (Previous posts are here, here and here.) I was thinking about it again recently, having heard a number of conversations in which people were having to deal with emotional fall-out from this experience in the context of a competitive environment.

There were three main elements that struck me about what people were struggling with. Their ensembles had (a) worked their socks off, (b) found themselves with a slightly lower score than the year before, and (c) had been told by their friends that they were sounding better and better. I wanted to stop and reflect on each of these elements, as they form a clear and recognisable pattern that a lot of groups experience.