Bear with me while I try to apply military strategy to our choral art. Military strategy has a term called “the Fog of War” which refers to uncertainty, specifically areas of engagement that can’t be known from one’s position. Wikipedia: “The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one’s own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign.”
As conductors, we often have our own “fog.” If I could define the “Fog of Conducting,” it might seek to capture uncertainty regarding… what? Our musicians’ differing artistic connections to a piece? Their performance capability in any given rehearsal due to those pesky lives that happen outside of our hall? The audience’s potential reactions to a performance?
Stephen Covey says that the 5th Habit of Highly Effective people is to “Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood.” If there is a fog that we do not always penetrate as conductors, are we truly seeking first to understand? If we understood more, could we more effectively shape our performance, and performers, as leaders of our ensembles?
We don’t have time to sit down for a cup of coffee with each singer in our ensembles on a weekly basis. We do, however, have many ways to communicate with them easily and quickly, that we could solicit feedback and meaningful information from them. Some ideas:
- Set up an ensemble blog: You can post your rehearsal notes, and open it up for musician comments or questions. Ask for a volunteer from each section to post their observations on areas of difficulty (or greatness!). Post your upcoming rehearsal schedule and ask them to “preflect” on the sections in question.
- Twitter: If many musicians have Twitter accounts, following them (and they you) alows quick snapshots into their areas of interest and activity.
- Facebook groups, Google + circles, etc.: Social networking allows easy ways to share discussions and media between groups of people. As a bonus, many of your musicians may already be familiar with these services.
With any of these groups, the key is content: What questions would you, as a conductor, like to ask of each member of your group? What reactions do you hope (or wonder if) your singers are having? What are the big ideas of your performance, piece, etc., that you’d like to discuss?
How do you communicate with your groups outside of rehearsal? How do you penetrate the “Fog of Conducting,” and would you like to do it more?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.