Confession, the spiritual masters tell us, is good for the soul. It’s not hard to see why. Confession lightens the conscience. It deflates the ego and allows us to offload the guilt we carry, sometimes without even being consciously aware of it. So I hope you’ll permit me the opportunity to confess a few secrets of my own, just this once.
The first of these secrets, and probably the most important, is that the greatest lessons about the choral art are ones that I never learned in school. For all the money I paid and all the time I invested acquiring an education, what matters most are the lessons my choirs and colleagues have taught me. That wasn’t always the case. When I began work in this profession I didn’t have any questions, because I thought I already knew all the answers.
I was wrong, of course. I wasn’t listening at that point, because I didn’t think that my singers had anything worthwhile to tell me. Breaking through the shell of arrogance and becoming teachable was a costly process that took time to accomplish and even longer to appreciate. I owe my early choirs a huge debt of gratitude for bearing with me in those years of my apprenticeship. About the only way I can repay them is by putting into practice now the things they were attempting to teach me then.
Just as important is an insight my colleagues gave me. I maintain contact with a few friends from my undergraduate days at Westminster Choir College. Recently, we were discussing our common vocation in church music. My friend Marcia Sommers Mau, who directs an exemplary graded choir program in suburban Philadelphia, said the secret of her success was simple: she loves her people. Because she does, and because they know that she does, Marcia’s many choirs trust that the music she chooses for them will be worth the time and effort required to learn it.
This single admonition, simple as it was, transformed what I do and how I do it.
That transformation happened eventually. But before it could, Marcia’s words made me miserable, because they revealed an ugly truth: I loved the music more than the people who actually made it. “I’m not angry, I’m just intense,” I would say in the heat of rehearsal. Yet deep down I knew that this was a lie. I secretly resented my singers’ errors. I resented their rehearsal schedule conflicts, their absences and their tardiness. I resented their slowness in making the changes I expected from them. I even resented my own inability to help them make those changes successfully.
Marcia’s comment exposed my relentless pursuit of perfection for what it really was: an end, not a means; an idol that demanded unquestioned, total worship. So from that day forward, at the top of each and every rehearsal plan I create, I have crayoned in bright red block capital letters the words LOVE YOUR PEOPLE, or LOVE EVERYONE HERE TONIGHT, or LOVE THE PEOPLE WHO GIVE UP THEIR TIME JUST TO BE WITH YOU, or something equally simple and true.
As you might expect, the impact of this little decision was immediate — and profound. Whenever something went awry in rehearsal, as things frequently do, I would glance up at my silent red reminder, curb my tongue, have a breath, and then smile at my singers.
Amazingly, this decision produced some major benefits. First, my singers found themselves smiling back at me, even if they weren’t quite sure why they were. Second, the Choral IQ (Intensity Quotient) in our rehearsals dropped dramatically. And finally, the breathing space this momentary pause created gave me a chance to remember why we were there in the first place, re-set my brain, and figure out the best way to correct the problem we were grappling with at the time.
Some time after instituting this new practice, one of my lead altos happened to notice my rehearsal plan sitting out on the music stand. She read it, and with a twinkle in her eye said, “Well, duh! Who wants to make music with people you hate?” Nothing more was said. And nothing else needed to be.
The second lesson my singers taught me is directly related to the first: in performance situations, my primary tasks are to remain focused, stay in the present moment and give the ensemble what it needs next. Period. This jewel originated from a pointed comment by Kathy, one of our sopranos, after the Chancel Choir sang one of my anthem arrangements.
The singing had gone very well, with just a minor glitch on the release of one final consonant. When that happened, I reflexively shot a quick glance at the section that had missed the release (not the soprano section, incidentally). It wasn’t a particularly withering look, and certainly nothing like the classic “blue stare of death” for which I’d become infamous in years past.
Even so, it was more than enough to cause Kathy to find me in my office after the service was over. “Please don’t look at us like that when we make a mistake,” she said. “I know you want us to do our best. Believe me — we do, too. But when you do what you did this morning, you make it hard for me to do what I come here for: to offer my gift of music as an act of worship to God.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather.
Not only was Kathy willing to trust that I was willing and able to hear what she had to say, which was no small gift in itself, but what she said had the unmistakable ring of truth to it. I realized that I had become seduced by the past, caught up in the game of keeping score of what couldn’t be changed, and thereby compromising my ability to do what mattered most: figure out what my singers needed next, and give it to them. I was suffering from an acute case of “I-strain,” and needed to be reminded that conductors live for their choirs, not the other way around. In the end, it’s all about them. It’s never really about us.
Successful performance conducting, I learned years ago, essentially requires little more than giving a series of clear preparation gestures, one after another. But until Kathy told me the simple truth in her gentle way, I was at risk of missing the only place our art ultimately exists: in the present moment. It really is all that we have.
So if you retain nothing else from reading these thoughts, please remember to love your singers, and listen to them. They have a wealth of lessons to share, if you’re willing to let them teach you. Love them. Let them.
Gerald Custer is Director of Music at First Presbyterian Church of Farmington in Farmington Hills, Music Director of the Seaway Chorale and Orchestra in downriver Detroit, and conductor of Cantate, a chamber choir in Novi. He teaches music theory, composition, and choral literature at Wayne State University.
