Okay, brace yourself, I am in one of my moods today.
Someone sent me to a blog post by a fairly famous and influential business blogger, and I discovered, to my dismay, that it was just a bit of “fluff.” It was all about “believing in yourself” and “not being held back by other people’s attitudes” and so on. Good for them, but I take exception to this sort of thing, and I’ll tell you why.
The summer before my junior year in high school, I trotted off to the high school program at Tanglewood. Long story short, I got to sing in a performance conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Needless to say, when I got back to Toledo, I thought I was pretty hot stuff, and I got the bright idea of doing some conducting myself. After all, I had sung for Leonard Bernstein for some 9 hours, so I assumed that I must be some sort of genius. So one day I gathered about 15 of my high school peers into a music room, I had a fellow student who claimed she could play the piano, I dug out some dustmite ridden vocal parts to a Mendelssohn Oratorio, and with more than just a little bit of eager anticipation, I started to wave a white stick I had carefully selected and bought for this grand occasion.
There are moments in life when truly harsh clarity is visited upon one suddenly and without mercy, and this was one of them. A vague muttering of musical nonsense was all that could be elicited from this group of totally untrained individuals. After ten minutes of total embarrassment, I ran home.
I did not give up, however. My mother, a professional musician, became my coach and accompanist, and I started to learn, from the ground up, how to train amateur singers. It had to be drummed into them note by rote note, but it finally came together.
So when I became a professional bass player, I started to run into conductors that, because they went right to conducting professional orchestras, had never learned the basics. Being professionals, we played in spite of their input. There was one guy I will never forget . . . he used to say “Make it more beautiful . . . .” And in our minds we would mythically ask, “So, do you want it louder softer, longer shorter, higher lower, faster slower? Because a note is a note, those are the four dimensions of change we can make for you, and we have no idea of what you want.”
Yes, there is a lot to be said for having a positive outlook I suppose, but all the enthusiasm in the world, by itself, will not cure your leprosy. In fact, too much enthusiasm can be a waste of precious energy.
When I hear such vague statements about being “more positive,” my inner hackles of contempt are raised– they remind me too much of the many rehearsals I had to grind through trying to pretend that what the conductor was saying actually made sense and could be sensibly applied. There were so many conductors who, okay, had good intentions of seeking emotional connection, they had a vague grand vision of wonderfulness, but they had no real clue of what went into executing the piece note by note, and what was possible and what wasn’t, and how much of the job was merely creating an illusion for the audience.
The best conductors never asked for greater enthusiasm or positivism. It occurred naturally from the joy of working with them. Joe Silverstein is a great example– every time he opened his mouth, he said something that improved everything instantly. No need to elicit enthusiasm, it happened by itself.
If everyone is currently not very positive, there may be a very pressing reason for it. Asking everyone to be positive, and presenting that as the "big fix," without addressing the issue of the army of Vandals and Goths at the city gates, is pointless. If one does not have a clear appreciation of the difficulties at hand, this actually elicits contempt from everyone. If a leader wants things to be different, well, they have to tell us exactly what they mean, and they need to know that there will be a tradeoff no matter what we do, and if we don’t think they know what they're doing, we will not tell them about the tradeoff, we’ll just act sincere and hope they get tired and go away.
On the plus side, I once played for Bobby McFerrin, and when he said “it needs to be more beautiful,” he would then sing it exactly the way he wanted it. And he did, in fact, make it “more beautiful.” It was crystal clear instruction, no vague hope, no trial and error in figuring out what he meant. We loved it.
© Justin Locke
