A group’s capability is related to its internal differences. Work with those and all kinds of capabilities can be revealed.
One of the joys of my life is singing with my a cappella Renaissance choir, Carmena Bowena. For the past six yers we have worked on a repertoire of mostly Renaissance sacred music and madrigals and spreading into slightly later southern European folk music from places like Spain, France, Corsica and Italy. We have sung contemporary arrangements of songs by Sting and Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot and modern settings of old liturgical texts like Ubi Caritas, Ave Maria and O Nata Lux and O Magnum Mysterium.
Last season we added an Irish pub night on St. Patricks Day which will will repeat again this season and our vocal adventure will extend to include a whole show devoted to Broadway, on November 23. Our season will wrap up on June 26 with an electic performance of songs from this whole range of music making.
Monday night was our first rehearsal of the season and we worked on some of the sacred music pieces which we will perform at a contemplative experience on January 30. Specifically we looked at Voctoria’s O magnum mysterium, Robert Parson’s Ave Maria and a Kyrie from Palestrina.
These pieces are interesting to compare side by side. Palestrina’s smooth voice leading almost defines the very genre of Renaissance liturgical music. His harmonies are tight, and mostly consonant, while Victoria, writing in Spain, offers more “crunch” as we say in his work. The opening of the Kyrie is pure imitative polyphony. Altos, then Basses, Sopranos and then Tenors. We just worked the first few bars of this, and danced together with the entrances and lines moving against each other.
In contrast, looking at Victoria’s piece, we focused only on the final few bars, the Alleluia. The piece is very modal and slow but the final section has a jaunty little 3/4 section that returns to the original slow 4/4 time of the rest of the piece. It’s tricky, but shows up some of his more interesting compositional decisions.
Parson’s Ave Maria Parsons’s Ave Maria was chosen partly because of its extraordinary soprano line. Beneath it, four voices weave and braid their lines together; the soprano enters above them in long notes, each successive entrance beginning a step higher than the one before. The bass anchors the other extreme of the texture, and as we sing it I have the sensation of the whole piece opening up between those high and low registers. To me it is evocative of Mary receiving the message of the angel: thoughts moving and rising through her mind while something deeper and steadier holds the whole experience.
After working through short sections of these pieces, we flew into a short survey of Broadway tunes, which most everyone could sight read, so familiar are they. You’ll Never Walk Alone, Welcome to the Rock, I Dreamed a Dream, Edelweiss, and others. We’ve never done show tunes before but I think this show will be a treat. It’s not music I have sung a lot (other than at football matches) but some of it is certainly in the repertoire of the jazz standards I play with my friend Alex Fox.
So another season of music begins. I thought I’d chart this one here a bit this year.
I work with lots of organizations in transition, and always have done. Specifically organizations who leadership is leaving, often representing a transition from a founder to the next generation. These situations are fraught with new and unexpected emotions, states, and situations. The folks that remain find themselves relying on stuff that was invisible before the transition but which is missed now. It is a time when movement forward needs to be slow and deliberate.
Today I read a lovely and heart-filled post from Jasmine Williams at the Interaction Institute for Social Change describing this moment. It's a moment of aporia – "being at a loss" – and a moment which demands that a group and individuals be in a different way. Jasmine writes about the practices she is relying on in these moments including ,
**What's for us will find us
**This is one of those affirmations, mantras, that I keep on a sticky note attached to my computer. It’s a grounding reminder to myself that we will move through this in the way we were supposed to. Whether you believe in fate or some grand design or not, I believe there’s wisdom to be found in returning to a foundational trust in the winding path that leads to the abundant future (however different that future may be from current expectations).
A side benefit of rooting in this reminder is that it’s allowed me to hold on more gently and leave space for the emergent, unexpected, and confronting. How freeing it can be to release the tight hold on an outcome when you trust it will be the right one, reached at the right time, by the right people!
There is an art to this kind of waiting-to-be-found. It requires sensitivity and awareness. It requires quieting and emptying so that one is available to be found. And it also requires slow movement and lots of scanning for possibilities. If what is needed hasn't revealed itself yet, it's a sign to slow down. It will come. I love that these virtual friends are being so transparent with what they are practicing.
Dave Snowden publishes a post today thick with some interesting brain research and some musing about how we might structure organizations along the lines of what we know about how brains work:
What would be different is an organisational design practice that treats cognitive profile distribution as an analogue substrate to maintain, not individual variation to manage toward a norm. It would assess tools, processes, and frameworks for their effect on that substrate — asking, in Clark’s terms, whether each is scaffolding or substituting, rather than measuring only their effect on output. It would recognise that anything enforcing cognitive convergence at scale- process environments, competency frameworks, uniform AI policy- is making a trade on behalf of the collective that the collective has not been asked to consent to, and may not be able to reverse.
I spent a few hours this morning reading about the Oxford Praxis Lab. I know of Rob Poynton who is the director of the Lab, and whose book, Everything’s An Offer was one of the seminal books I read 15-20 years ago as I was exploring improv and embodied exercises and the teaching and hosting practices that I was developing.
Praxis Lab is an interesting place where a number of the questions I have recently been in seem to have a good home, where they are watered and fed and well cared for.
Each of us are entangled in a series of systems – personal, familial, organisational, professional, societal and ecological – that are themselves interconnected. But the only point of view you have on any of those systems is your own – a point of view which has, built into it, a series of assumptions, values, beliefs, measures and metrics that you take for granted (if you even see them at all).
Grappling with such systems, seeking to understand them (so that you can disturb them in an intelligent way) requires you to look at yourself, in the context of that system. You have to understand how your own history, perspective, personality and so on, affect how you see and how you act.
This is not navel gazing. It is simply to recognise that we are all, always, in some measure, participant-observers. There is nowhere to stand that is neutral and no privileged or ‘correct’ level of analysis. Whichever perspective you adopt, it is always one of many.
Acknowledging that and learning from it means knowing yourself and your own predilections – which is also a valuable outcome in itself.
They are currently beginning a research project called “Pause Pairs” which I’m going to do with my friend Tenneson Woolf.
Following one of Rob’s links brought me to Nick Askew’s video page, which is another place to lose oneself in these questions and experiments. His collection includes a playlist of interviews with Complexity Facilitators as well as some interviews with my friend Ria Baeck.