Rehearsing

What are we doing when we rehearse - be it in an orchestra, for a play, for a presentation?

Hard to answer just like that, because different kinds of rehearsals have different goals. A rehearsal wedding dinner is a different kind of rehearsal from the weekly meet-up of a village choral society.

We can divide rehearsals into two basic categories: the kind geared to making something better, and the kind geared to seeing if anything is going to go wrong. Because our primary understanding of the concept of 'rehearsing' is to do with working at something to make it better, we use more specific names to differentiate the second kind - dry run, trial-run, walk-through, run-through, crash test.

So let's leave aside this category of late-stage rehearsal (where we are simply trying to answer the question: can we get through it without a train wreck, and if not, why not?) and just consider the first kind.

I suggest that almost everything we do in these rehearsals is summarised by one basic principle: moving the unconscious to the conscious. We are simply trying to become aware of all the things we are doing without being aware of them, and getting rid of all except the ones we would choose to do.

This leaves out the early processes of learning a piece (to take the musical/theatre example which is my main concern). When you're learning, in fact, it's the opposite process: you're doing something consciously (reading music) and trying to make it subconscious so you can free your mind up for something else (communicating with the audience, acting a scene, conducting an orchestra).

But when it moves to the realm of the subconscious, and even before, it isn't just the product of what we've been practising. It's also all the ticks and habits we've accumulated over years of not paying attention to every detail of what we're doing. Most of the time when a director or conductor identifies something somebody is doing that is holding the performance back, it isn't something they meant to do, it's something they didn't know they were doing.

Perhaps the space in between identifying all these things and adding something more is where good leaders (directors, conductors, sports coaches) become great. But you can't have the 1% inspiration without the 99% perspiration, which is where many talented but inexperienced young conductors have problems: if you can't fix the basic things it's no good having brilliant ideas. Hence the frustration experienced by many young talented leaders when they see older colleagues they regard as hacks getting a better result: 'I am way more musical than that guy', they fume, 'why doesn't the orchestra respond to me?' Unless you have such a brilliant orchestra to conduct that there are no problems to fix - which most young conductors at the start of their careers don't - you've got to allocate time to fixing problems, which takes away time from explaining your earth-shattering interpretative ideas. There's always a temptation to spend too much time on the exciting part.