Choral Potpourri: Choral Ethics; Being Respectful

“If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.” Winston Churchill

When I first conceived this “R” Choral Ethics series for January, I thought I would use various people’s problems and situations to illustrate. For three of my Blogs this month, it has been easy to pick examples. In fact, last week’s Holly* is a composite of very similar problems sent to me over the fall.

This week’s “respect” subject has been quite difficult to narrow down. Many of you struggle with being respected (by your singers and other directors), showing respect to your singers or your accompanists (they’ve emailed me, so don’t tell me it’s not you!) or other directors/conductors not respecting you and not respecting your volunteers (see above!). Whew, I don’t know where to begin! I get at least one email a week about some aspect of lack of respect and so have plenty of examples. But it’s hard to choose which ones are the most important. So I have decided to write about respect in our profession and perhaps use one or two very glaring examples.

Why is there such a problem with respect, and the lack there of, in our profession? Contemplating this problem for many years, I think it boils down to a lack of trust as well as our own lack of self-esteem. We don’t trust our colleagues—their musical training or talent or motives. We don’t trust our singers or accompanists to prepare adequately for rehearsals or performances without belittling them, which is where the self-esteem issue comes in. We don’t trust our volunteers, whether music parent groups or adult volunteers. We don’t believe anyone when they tell us they cannot do something for us. We take advantage and don’t respect their time. Our motives are “pure” but we don’t trust the other players in our choral life to have those pure motives.

We behave like a “wimp” in rehearsal, believing appearing less decisive makes us more “likeable” to our singers and accompanists. Our singers and accompanists feel they can do whatever they want to in rehearsal. Then we are surprised by the seemingly lack of respect they show us. We want everyone to be our friend, yet no one is because they don’t respect us.

Or we behave like an ogre in rehearsals, equating respect with fear. Our singers and accompanists may fear us, but do they respect us? Calling our accompanists “fumble fingers” in front of the whole chorus may seem funny, but in reality, it is just plain mean. And what part did YOU play in their stumbling through something? Did you TELL them you would be working on that difficult passage for that rehearsal? And how did you teach that difficult passage to your singers? It could be your lack of a good rehearsal strategy causing them not to “get it” and not their lack of musicianship, or whatever other clever comment you make to degrade them.

We belittle other choral organizations, church choirs or school choral programs because tearing someone else down makes us feel up. We encourage our singers to believe we are the best community chorus or church choir or school chorus and everyone else is second-class. We undermine our colleagues by gossiping and inferring—or actually coming right out and saying—they are bad directors or conductors and why would anyone want to sing with THEM? We are an example to our singers and students; our behavior is what they believe to be the only correct one. And we are creating a legacy of singers and students who believe we are the only choir director in the whole world. Is that what we want?

 In order to be respected, we must be respectful. And that means even on the internet. I love clever, witty comments and catch phrases as much as the next person but why must we be provocative to strangers? They don’t know us and may not even be of the same generation. Clean it up in such a way everyone will know what you’re talking about and get your point, instead of berate you for your choice of words. That takes away from your whole thrust, doesn’t it?

I would love to continue this “respect” conversation. Please comment with YOUR ideas about respect in our profession. It’s an important topic.

*Name Withheld