ABSTRACT

John Bertalot's vignette of the start of a choir rehearsal captures many of the key issues that surface repeatedly in discussions of how to transform a more or less random group of people into a coherent and effective choral ensemble. These include questions of group identity, of discipline and the director's own obligations to the choir. While the boundaries that define choral practice are constituted through discourse, their enforcement relies on a range of disciplinary mechanisms operated by both conductors and by the singers themselves. To maintain the boundaries by literal exclusion is less important than to do so by the modification of participants' conduct. The transformation is effected on one hand through processes of surveillance and coercion and on the other through the internalization of values. The technologies of power provide the surveillance mechanisms by which the choral director enforces required behaviour. It succeed most fully when they prompt the singers into operating the technologies of the self.