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I sing in a small a cappella group at our local university. And by “small” I mean, “If one of the other women doesn’t turn up for rehearsal, I probably have to change parts.”

I’ve been singing with this group for nearly six years, and we’ve got a repertoire of about… oh… 30 songs or so. Not all performance-ready, especially because we don’t have a completely stable core group, but we have been known to pull even the rusty ones out at an open mic night after a couple of beers.

Be on time. Warm up. Try to have some fun. And…

Know your part!

There is nowhere to hide in a group this small. If you are off, the whole group is off. Practice! Listen to it even when you are not at rehearsal. Sing along with the recording. Put in the counterpoint when you hear it on the radio.

There is a team depending on you, not to mention the audience you are someday going to perform for.

Listen. Then listen some more

The key to blending isn’t just singing what’s on the page (although that’s a great starting point.) It is more important to stay attuned to what’s going on around you. Make eye contact. Listen to where the edges aren’t meeting up. Some of it is in the notes, and some of it is in the overtones. It’s the little adjustments on the fly that make the difference between an acceptable performance and one that you can be really proud of.

Sometimes, you are just off key

This one took a while for me to get. I used to get defensive if somebody suggested that I was flat, or sharp, or perhaps had read the note completely wrong.  

What I have finally managed to realize is that when somebody points out a note and says, “I think you’re a bit flat here,” it is a statement of fact, not a moral judgement: You are not singing what is written on this page. It is making it harder for the rest of us.

Now I say, “Yup. I’ll have to work on that bit.”

You can improvise and still fit in

I played something on the piano the other day and discovered that I have been making up the harmony for about three years. In this case, it was still blending, but still… it is not what was written on the page.

I turned around and said, “I’ve been doing this wrong since 2015.” They said, “OK, but what you are doing sounds fine. Let’s move on.”

(Perhaps this one is actually, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”)

Just because you can hit a note doesn’t mean you should

Let’s be honest… we’re not all sopranos. Most of us can’t even play one on TV.

There are a couple of songs that we sing that hang out near the top of the soprano range. Speaking for myself, I know I can hit that A just above the treble clef once in a song, but I have to take a run at it. I should generally never be above a C/D for longer than a bar at a time.

Technically, I hit the notes pretty consistently, but they get thready and piercing. Not a pleasant singing or listening experience.

Play to your strengths

On the other hand, if most of my notes hang out between the A below middle C and that B♭just before I start getting piercing, sometimes, just sometimes, it is glorious. Full, emotionally meaningful, and a joy to do.

A Merely Technical Performance Misses the Point

You can hit all the notes, get all the harmonies, but music is more than just the notes on the page. The beauty lies in the overtones, the emotional content… sometimes we have a conversation that starts something like, “I feel like this piece needs to be a bit lighter.” We try a couple of different things… shorten the notes, swing it a bit… but those are not things you can exactly write down.

There’s an art to singing in a small choral group, and it comes from doing it over and over and over again until it sounds right… and then you say, “That was great! Let’s do it like that every time!” (ha ha ha ha ha…)

Not every performance can be your best

Of course, then we try to do it like that every time, and… sometimes it just doesn’t work. I remember our illustrious leader having to say in the middle of a performance, “And that was the first half of Happy Together.” Two of us had had to change parts in the previous week and we got confused with all the repeats. It fell apart. The sad part is, it’s one of our easiest songs. We use it for auditions with new members.

You roll with it. It’s live music. It’s on stage. There is nowhere to hide.

Keep a sense of humour about it and people will forgive you

One of my favourite recordings of all time is of Ella Fitzgerald forgetting the words to Mack the Knife. Fortunately, she’s was excellent at making up words: “Now Ella, Ella, and her fellas… we’re making a wreck… a wreck of… Mack the Knife.”

There’s a song on Eric Clapton’s Unplugged album where he forgets to take off (or put on) his capo, and he has to stop after the first line, fix it, and start over.

I love both of these recordings. I’m sure their audiences did, too.

Hard Things can become Easy Things. Or Not.

A lot of things that are hard will get easier with practice. Some of them are easier as long as somebody knows how to do them. Some things stay hard, and you need to figure out workarounds if you want to keep doing them anyway.

A couple of our favourite songs took us over two years to get right, with much mirth (or snarling, depending on the mood of the person who was struggling most that week.) Now that a bunch of us know them, though, we can usually integrate a new singer in a few weeks.

We have one song where the melody changes sections every few bars, so we always get one person to just sing “handrail.” Which is to say, “Keep singing the melody so that we have something to come back to if we get lost.” It’s actually a simple song, but the arrangement is difficult.

Also, every few weeks we pull out a terrifyingly difficult arrangement of Momentum to see whether we can all get to the last bar at the same time. That’s a win on that one. Here’s a link to the original, because you are never going to hear us sing this song.

And one more

I can also now sing a minor seventh chord. Go me.

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P.S. This was a metaphor. And also, not.

In which I consider the problem of finding meaningful work, recognize its parallel in the startup world, and close some branches of exploration

A couple of years ago I was looking for a central metaphor for a book I was working on about the problem of finding meaning in one’s life choices. My core question was, “Knowing that you could do all sorts of things, which will make you more or less happy, or successful, or fulfilled, how do you decide what you should do?”

While considering myths that might yield some fruit, I stumbled upon a search algorithm called “Ariadne’s thread.”

This is an approach to finding possible solutions to a complex problem. Imagining the world of “all possible solutions” as a branching tree, you venture down a path. At each branch you note where you are and add it to a list of where you have been, so that if you run out of options on this branch, you can return to the last branching point.

Like all metaphors, it has its limitations: you can’t, in fact, return to the branching points in your life and try something different.⁽¹⁾ You can decide to do something that you previously chose not to do, but the system will not be in the same state.⁽²⁾

It has an obvious drawback, though, even just as a search algorithm that’s just using CPU cycles, and not burning up years of your limited time on this planet – if you don’t have a way to stop going down a path and turn around, you have no way of knowing that the “right” (best) solution was down another branch entirely.

Interestingly, the vaguely defined problem of “making a living” is pretty much the same problem that startups face: How do you find an interesting problem that you are equipped to work on? How do you know if it is the “best” thing to work on? (Hint: you don’t.) Alright, then… how do you know if it is “good enough” to work on? When do you pivot (move into a connected branch) and when do you close up shop, abandon the job or the business, and shift your energies to something completely different?

Even more interesting, it is mathematically the same problem as solving crystal structures from first principles, namely: traversing a phase space without getting caught in local minima.

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Allow me to lean on wikipedia for a moment to consider the merits of the two approaches:

In this context, a search method is described as being complete if it is guaranteed to find a goal state if one exists. Breadth-first search is complete, but depth-first search is not. When applied to infinite graphs represented implicitly, breadth-first search will eventually find the goal state, but depth-first search may get lost in parts of the graph that have no goal state and never return.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadth-first_search

Let’s assume, at least, that there are (in life) ways for each person to be happy, fulfilled, and successful. Enough. Somewhere in the world, there exist (as my son puts it) “islands of potential happiness.” Let’s assume also that there are unsolved problems which contain potential benefits and might allow a company to make some money while solving them. What one needs in either case is a way to declare, “Hey, this thing I’m doing is good enough (for now). It it time to stop traversing the tree and start executing.”

Teasing out a couple more details from these articles, both approaches take about the same time, but only the breadth is protected from getting caught in indefinitely exploring unfruitful branches. Note, though, that a breadth approach will only “eventually” find the solution… if one exists… there is no promise on timeline. Arguably, therefore, there is merit in taking some time to survey the terrain before committing to a particular course in life, but you do need to be able say, “OK. Time’s up on that scanning part. Let’s get down to business.”

If, on the other hand, you are constitutionally inclined to the depth-first approach,³ you also need a way to say, “Hey! This isn’t working… Stop looking and go back up!”⁴

This is where the sense of metrics comes into play… what are we going to consider a good enough solution? It should probably be decided before the search is started, but we rarely have that luxury. Also, if the happiness literature is to be believed, we suck at guessing what those good-enough solutions are going to look like for our future selves. We need to keep checking in then: does this seem to be working? Is there good reason to believe that we are about to turn a corner, or is it wishful thinking? Do we, in fact, know what we are doing?

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The additional layer of complexity is this: many (many) people/businesses are exploring the same space simultaneously, and as they explore it, it changes. Consider, for example, that there may be dozens of people for whom a particular job is a genuinely good fit. Once somebody fills that job, it closes that branch off for all the other people. We can have several food delivery apps, but we probably can’t have dozens or hundreds. That branch is closed for further exploration (unless somebody manages to go past the existing solutions). There is no “next Facebook,” there is only something we haven’t thought of yet. It’s on a different branch of the tree.

Unfortunately, there is no obvious way of getting to it, because we don’t know what we’re trying to get to.

More on this later… because it is something essential about the world.

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1. “What if I had gone to medical school back there when I was 27?”
2. If you are now 36 with two children, the only question you can answer is, “What if I go to medical school now that I am 36?”
3. Like, you decided what you were going to be at 14 and have never looked back
4. “I hate my life,” is a good example. Also, “We’re running out of money and have no real revenue model.”