Screwtape Maleficus, DMA (as told to Gerald Custer)
2013 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Clive Staples Lewis, author of the Screwtape Letters, a collection of infernal advice from a senior devil to his nephew Wormwood, an apprentice tempter. In Lewis’ honor, Screwtape has agreed to release the previously unpublished correspondence that follows. —GSC
My Dear Wormwood,
I note with more consternation than pleasure that Our Father Below has assigned you the task of destroying a choir. Despite your manifest incompetence, you fortunately possess a potent secret weapon: me. As you may recall, my research for the Doctor of Maleficant Arts included helping those clever monks write the naughty lyrics of the Carmina Burana, so this is a subject of some personal expertise in our extended family.
To begin, do not underestimate the severity of this challenge for a moment! Although choirs are routinely considered the “war department” of most churches, sending a choir to Hell is more difficult than may initially appear to be the case. Do not imagine you can simply encourage general laxity in matters of pitch and diction and leave the rest to the singers’ own inclinations and devices. Well, except perhaps the basses. But I digress.
Your rule must ever be to invest wisely and work where the returns are greatest. Allow me to put this in terms that even you will grasp: go for the conductor. Once the director is yours, the rest of the ensemble will surely follow. Research has established that conductors are fragile to begin with, and afford countless opportunities even for a tempter of your admittedly limited talents.
One approach that seldom fails is to induce a severe case of “I-Strain.” Yes, Wormwood, you may be quite sure that I have spelled that correctly. Conductors, by dint of their exposed position, easily succumb to the perils of egocentricity. They naturally believe that everything that happens in rehearsal or performance is the direct result of their own efforts. They are sincerely and utterly convinced that it is always all about them.
Encourage this natural tendency, nephew, and you are well on your way to ruining the entire choir. If the sopranos sing flat, for example, tell your conductor it is because he is incompetent—or worse, because the sopranos secretly detest him and are singing below pitch purely out of spite. Singers who arrive late, leave early, work puzzles during rehearsal, fidget with their hair in performance, or even worse refuse to watch the conductor at all: these and a thousand similar foibles must be interpreted as solely and totally his fault alone.
A strategy that works hand in glove with this first is to maximize performance anxiety. Your goal is to take a laudable devotion to an ideal—the desire for perfection—and deform it into a tyrant that cannot be satisfied. It is true that one of their own, a conductor by the name of Robert Shaw, observed that there are no perfect performances, merely closer and closer approximations. Fortunately for you, no one in the earthly regions remembers him any longer.
Put it in your victim’s mind that there is never any excuse for anything less than perfection. Get him to insist on making each and every entrance absolutely precise—and each release even more so. Have him repeat attacks and releases endlessly, until the spirit of the entire ensemble is infected with resentment and bruised by his churlishness. The more time he wastes in the vain pursuit of utter, instant perfection, the worse for him—and the better for you.
There is much more to be said about these matters, of course. But given your seemingly infinite capacity for misconstruing even the simplest instructions, I think it best to stop at this point for now.
Your devoted uncle,
Screwtape
* * *
Dear Wormwood,
Given your dismal performance so far, it is clearly past time for your next lessons in choral ruination. Pay close heed, dear nephew!
Because choirs are composed of flawed human beings, they will make mistakes. This is, of course, how they learn. You must take great pains to obscure this reality as far as possible. Instead, get your conductor to focus exclusively on everything that is being done wrong, and to highlight each and every failure the instant it occurs. If he has taken a course in rehearsal conducting that included formal training in “error detection” (our colleagues in the Pedagogical Research branch have made major inroads in many of the best conservatories), so much the better.
Your objective here is to have the conductor diagnose problems without solving them. Urge him to make statements as frequently as possible along the lines of “Tenors, you’re flat!” “Altos, that vowel is truly ugly!” without once mentioning what the cause of the problem might be, much less offering ways to remedy it. All disease and no cure: this is how to bring a choir to ruin.
If the choir includes singers whose ambitions can be leveraged to reinforce this sense of failure under the guise of appearing helpful (“Pardon me, maestro, don’t you want us to sing a G# there?”), by all means use them: they are invaluable allies. When possible, get these “assistants” to interrupt the conductor when offering such comments.
You may have noticed that your conductor is talking a great deal at this point. This is not accidental. The more he speaks, the less the choir will actually be able to sing. Indeed, from our perspective the ideal rehearsal is one in which the ensemble sings as little as possible. Here in Hell we have actually succeeded in replacing rehearsals with lectures that feature no singing whatsoever.
In practical terms, ensure that the choir never warms up at the start of rehearsal. Warm-ups are for the weak. Real conductors eschew such things; they do not coddle their singers. Nor do real conductors ever permit a word of praise or any encouragement to pass their lips. They do not provide positive reinforcement or give feedback of any sort. They simply stop and say, “Again.” Endless repetition for no apparent reason comes across as mindless punishment, and it is a powerful technique for breaking the spirit of even the best choir.
The point that you must consistently hammer into your conductor’s brain is that the music is all that matters. Blind devotion to the gods of “period-appropriate performance practice” and “musical integrity” must always supersede the needs of the singers. The sooner a choir feels unappreciated, the better for your purposes.
As concrete as these simple suggestions are, I fear that they may be beyond you, Wormwood. Nevertheless, if you do manage to implement them, you will see the results that have thus far eluded you. For your sake, I devoutly hope that you take them seriously. If not, you will soon answer to terrors far worse than mine.
Your loving uncle,
Screwtape
* * *
Wormwood!
Despite my generous and gracious tutelage, you have proven spectacularly inept and unsuccessful. Nevertheless, I offer two final suggestions in the likely vain hope of staving off total disaster at your end.
If your victim is full of self-confidence, appeal to his pride. Convince him to show up without preparing the rehearsal or analyzing the scores in advance. Suggest that rehearsal plans are for musical drones without imagination and servile clock-watchers without instincts. The more you can get your conductor to put his ego ahead of his singers’ needs, the more they will realize he hasn’t invested the time to properly lead them. Lazy conductors and resentful choirs are truly a marriage made in hell. Do all you possibly can to foster it!
If all else fails, use the power of carry-on baggage. No, you miserable imbecile, I am not talking about laptop computers. I refer to the seething caldron of emotions lurking just below the surface of your conductor. I can see them roiling about now, so many fragrant tendrils of flavor: resentment … anger … disappointment … bitterness … frustration … fear. What a lovely stew they make!
As long as your candidate brings all this baggage into rehearsal with him (in other words, as long as you have prevented him from practicing detachment), the rest is easy: when feelings of violated ego, personal failure, rampant and repeated imperfection arise—as they are sure to do if you have prepared matters as I have described above—a lovely volcanic eruption of impatience and sarcasm are certain to quickly follow.
Even at this late point, I envy you the prospect of ruining another choir, Wormwood. When you are finished, please do look into sending us more tenors. We have divas aplenty, but as it is on earth, so also here below. We always need more tenors.
Your increasingly hungry uncle,
Screwtape
Dr. Gerald Custer is music director at First Presbyterian Church
in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Comments and suggestions are cordially
invited, and should be sent to custer@wayne.edu.
