Someone asked an interesting question on James O’Brien’s Mystery Hour phone-in yesterday. It went something like this:
“Why do orchestral musicians have the music in front of them? When you go and see your favourite band play, they don’t have music, so why do orchestras need it?”
The answer, when it came was enlightening. Because:
a) orchestras generally play a much larger repertoire of much longer pieces. It would be impossible to learn them all of by heart; and
b) most of the time, not everyone in the orchestra is playing. People come in at different times to do their bit. They follow the score so they know exactly when that should happen in this performance.
Both functions are important. When an orchestra perfoms a piece of music in public, they’re not usually playing it stone-cold, sight unseen – that happened in rehearsal. So during a performance they’re not using the score to read the music, they’re using it to remind them of the music. I don’t know many times I’ve read my Agatha Christies, but I couldn’t tell you the plot of any of them. But let me read the first line of one, and it all comes back to me. So that’s part of what the score does for musicians. Once they’ve learned it, it becomes a prompt, not an instruction.
The other thing the score is doing is providing context. So that everyone can pick up where they are meant to, without awkward silences or misalignments that would spoil the music. Because each performance is unique, it would be impossible to rely on calculation to achieve this, so the score acts as the common thread holding everything together.
You know where I’m going with this.
Turning your desired Customer Experience – the music you want your audience to hear, the feeling you want them to get by hearing it – into an OurScore does the same thing and more.
It allows your people to learn what to play before they do it and to practise on their own and with each other before performances.
Then it acts as a prompt – confirming what they know by heart and jogging their memory for the bits they don’t.
Finally it gives them context. They can see how their contribution fits in to the overall piece, and, because you’re a business not an orchestra, how the client in front of them has got to where they are.
Live orchestral performances are magical, not just because the individuals are talented, also because the score helps them play together to produce more than the sum of the parts.
And meanwhile, the composer can be somewhere else entirely.
Discipline makes Daring possible
