by Serguey Shinder
We spent forty minutes of a two hour rehearsal deciding whether a song should be played slower. I know it was forty minutes because I had started timing our rehearsals that winter, out of a suspicion that we were not actually playing very much during them, and the numbers turned out worse than the suspicion. Across six Tuesdays we averaged about fifty minutes of playing out of the hundred and twenty we had the room for.
The rest was not lost to anything dramatic. Nobody argued. It was four polite people circling the same question, because not one of us had the standing to close it. Somebody would suggest the slower tempo. Somebody else would say it might lose the energy. The first person would say yes, maybe, and then we would play it once at each speed, and then a fifth opinion would arrive from behind the drum kit, and twenty minutes later we would agree to think about it, which meant having the identical conversation the following week.
We were a democracy with no mechanism for reaching a decision, and that is not a democracy. It is a queue of opinions.
What we do now took one conversation to agree and felt faintly ridiculous to say out loud. Every song has an owner, usually whoever brought it in, though not always. On questions of arrangement for that song their call is final and everybody else's job is to play it. Anyone may ask to try it another way once, and we do try it, and then the owner decides and we move on. Nobody has to justify anything to anybody.
It changed more than the arithmetic, and the arithmetic changed: playing time went up to something like ninety minutes. What I did not expect is that the arrangements got braver. A group converges on whatever nobody objects to, and what nobody objects to is always the middle of the road. One person deciding will occasionally do something odd, and about a third of the odd things turned out to be the best moments in the set. The other two thirds we dropped the week after at no cost at all, because one person changes their mind quickly and a committee cannot.
I have stopped believing that unowned decisions are cheap because they are small. A team absorbs a wrong decision easily and cheaply. It cannot absorb an open one, because an open question comes back every time the subject is touched, and it costs the same twenty minutes every time it comes back.
So when I see something discussed twice without a conclusion, I stop the discussion and ask whose call it is. If nobody in the room knows the answer, that is the only thing worth fixing that day. The tempo question, incidentally, took our owner about nine seconds.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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