The Art of Communication
Peter Weigold: Composer, Conductor, and Change Management
Coach
At some point throughout
life our favorite teacher or coach told us that
communication is the key to successful relationships. The
two-way street that communication entails, both giving
and receiving, can be applied to all aspects of life.
Interpersonal skills and communication don't have
boundaries—they stretch from the engineer, to the
teacher, to Peter Weigold, the composer.
Weigold, composer, conductor, and change management
coach, believes that you must teach the person as much as
you teach the craft. He talks to News for a Change
about the message in his music.
NFC: You’ve got a strange
background to be involved in work in the business world.
How did all that happen? I can understand working with
orchestras and such, but how did it drift outside of that
world?
Weigold: I ran this course at the Guilford
School of Music for 10 years called performance in
communication skills. We brought in lots of different
kinds of trainers and we took the students through all
sorts of theatrical and communication and presentation
and those kinds of processes to help them as musicians
and as creative leaders, and in the end a lot of the work
with those students was about their life skills. We did
move away from the text as it were and do a lot of open
space work.
NFC: When you say you’re doing
communication skills for musicians, in what sense? For
their speaking or to look at their playing as being part
of dialogue and communication?
Weigold: Everything from the bottom, which
would be their artistic expression, to the top, which
would be walking on stage and saying “Good evening
ladies and gentlemen.” Particularly the bottom
levels where if they’re locked-up expressively, if
they have issues about how they say hello or goodbye,
that will come out in their music.
It’s like what certain theatre directors have done,
just taking it down to sort of naked
communication where everything becomes revealed;
it’s not hidden behind Mozart in a complicated
cello scale. It becomes very evident that someone is
faking or someone is good at beginnings and not ends or
someone noodles but doesn’t go deep. And if you
work in very simple ways you have also ways of starting
to bring those things to the surface.
NFC: I heard Ray Bradbury tell a
strange tale dialogue and how it affects communication of
all sorts. He’s a prolific writer but not all of
his books were big hits. He discovered when he was around
50 that his best writings were all written for one
person. This started when he was in junior high school;
instead of doing his homework, he’d have a little
journal inside his book in which he’d write a
story. At the end of the school day, he’d run to
his aunt’s house and read the story to
her—his best stories, he remembered, were the ones
that she liked. He then recalled that his best stories
since had been written to and for her. I kept asking him
what people were saying and ultimately the principle I
extracted from that was you can only speak to one person
at a time and others “hear” you best when
that one person is someone you know and care about. That
is, that all artistic expression that really
“works” is based on dialogue and when it
really cooks—it’s directed toward one person
and more than likely it’s someone that you
know.
Weigold: That’s interesting. It’s
sort of like the principle of resonance. I often teach
people how to band lead—how to stand in front of a
group of musicians and draw things from them. If
they’re bringing a part—say they want to
bring the clarinet in, and I say OK introduce the
clarinet part or whatever, they sometimes stare at the
floor or shut their eyes or stare at the ceiling. I say
look at the player and you won’t have to do
anything, because if you get the vibe of the player, then
“clarinetness” plus “Georgeness,”
or whoever the clarinetist is, will get in the circle
with you and the ideas will be there between you. If you
want to invent something for someone, the best thing to
do is not to think, “Now what does the clarinet
part go like?” But it’s to look at George,
the clarinetist, and evoke something out of the vibe that
is between you. And you’re talking about that on a
more general level. That’s within the room,
that’s how it works.
NFC: The other thing that I took from
that is related to a story in the Christian Bible. When
the disciples of Jesus were said to be speaking so that
each person heard what was being said in their own
language. I understood that to mean when you are in real
dialogue when others hear what you say in “their
language.”
Weigold: There’s a phenomenon of being
drawn in by the echoing cave of what people are doing and
then a kind of resonance if people are doing something
that resonates. It’s attractive. It draws things
in. That kind of conversation will draw attention to
itself.
NFC: So
that’s where this training of yours began with that
kind of work?
Weigold: Yes, because I was training them to
compare with and to improvise and I was also training
them to be workshop leaders. I was training them to go
into schools, colleges, or stand in front of orchestras
and be a creative director—draw things from people.
So I was training leadership skills as well as creative
skills basically.
NFC: Interesting. And then other
people just started to come?
Weigold: I’ve worked a lot in education
and I’ve done a bit within the therapeutic
movement. There’s a therapeutic center in Greece
where I’ve been a few times. I’ve often
worked with non-musicians like when I was in Greece;
I’d work with a room full of people from business
and social studies. And then just in the last few years
I’ve started to do it within this business
context.
NFC: It really comes off as improving
their communication or listening.
Weigold: It’s getting the idea that
communication has something to do with a live spirit in
the room rather than a sequence of exchanged pieces of
information. The Erickson people I worked with mainly had
an engineering
background. So they saw communication as information
exchange. Which is different from communicating how
bowled over you were by the sun coming up or by the sheer
awesomeness of a certain system or something. I was
working on the basic things like speaking clearly and
presenting things in threes rather than in tens and
looking at your audience, which is important even if
you’re imparting pure information. But I was also
talking about that kind of thing artists have of not just
saying it, but saying it in a way that evokes feelings,
thoughts, and attentions beyond it. Saying things in an
imaginative way.
NFC: When people have seen a film or
presentation or they’ve listened to a great speech
with real communication or dialogue going on
they’re drawn in, as you say, and end up feeling as
if Martin Luther King or John Kennedy or Winston
Churchill is speaking directly to them. I think of
stories of President Roosevelt in World War II and
Winston Churchill in England… people would sit by
the radio and think they were being spoken to
directly.
Weigold: I was just thinking. It’s not
just that people are speaking directly, but also
truthfully isn’t it. It’s something to do
with a sense of authenticity or truth or honesty in
what’s being said.
NFC: A lot of people talked about that
and it’s unguarded or naked or however you want to
say it.
Weigold: Honest, or
vulnerable.
NFC: People often are looking at it as
just information exchange, but there’s no other way
to run organizations if you can’t communicate
clearly, honestly, authentically, and at the same time
listen. It doesn’t make any
difference whether it’s written or
spoken.
Weigold: When you say listen it’s the
way in which you respect the bodies and the souls of the
people you’re talking to isn’t it? You talk
in such a way so that you listen to them listening so
it’s touching their flesh rather than no flesh or
anybody’s flesh. The listening quality is having
sympathy for your audience as well as empathy. Some kind
of feeling for how they’re
feeling.
NFC: When you’re doing the
workshops with strictly business folks are you using
music as well to do it?
Weigold: I move in and out of music. I did
one very nice thing where I was with a very fine
saxophone player, one of the best in this country. There
were six people in the room and I got them to decide
which synthesizer sound they liked. And I made up six
short pieces of music that the sax player and I played
and then each of the executives had to introduce us and
they had to imbue us both with the music, drink it up as
it were, get a feeling for it. And then introduce us so
as to invoke the music and also just practice the skills
of “he’s come from England” and all
that introductory stuff. Therefore, they had to transpose
their presentation skills toward interpreting something
of us and embracing who we were and what we were doing.
It got them into more soulful talking. They enjoyed
trying to express in words the effect of this music. It
got them in touch with expressing things from what
they’d sensed as well as from what they
thought.
NFC: Have you been at it with the
non-musicians long enough that you’ve heard back
that it seems to stick with them perhaps better than
other types of training they’ve
had?
Weigold: I haven’t done that many, but
the feedback seems to be that they were touched and there
was a kind of visceral memory of that because
they’d really felt and really
performed.
NFC: I guess you’ll hear over
the years how well it sticks. Oftentimes people get
training or they have some experience that seems to have
changed them but then old patterns are really rather
difficult....
Weigold: Yeah, and you can’t teach
someone to be John Cleese or Mozart in a day.
There’s only so much you can do in a day. I guess
the thing is to get people high isn’t it?
It’s very easy to get people excited and
enthusiastic. I sort of try to have a mixture of
inspiring things that get them excited but then some
ground ideas about how they can use it or practice
it.
NFC: Having them do the introductions.
You moved them out of their normal way of learning and
then with the practice of applying some of it that must
have helped....
Weigold: I’m always thinking, whether
it’s with businessmen or teaching competition or
conducting rehearsals, always trying to distill things to
the essences, like the nature of openings or closings, or
doing things in threes, or the nature of silence, the
nature of poetic imagery. To distill some of the really
basic things so that everyone can remember, whether
they’re with engineers or in front of an orchestra,
the importance of silence and the importance of breath
between phrases. I’m always looking for those
universal things like breath between phrases that would
apply in other things. Little exercises that help people
have the confidence to take breaths. I sometimes do
conducting kinds of things where there’s a sound
going on and then someone has to stop it and hold the
attention of the audience. They go, “Stop.”
Hold a physical gesture and hold everyone in the room in
that pause. And then say, “go” and the thing
starts again. That ability to hold the room just by
saying stop. Go. The quality of that pause and the sense
of timing as to when to release it again—a great
conductor has that. But also someone like Kennedy would
have that when he stopped in the middle of a phrase, let
the pin drop, and then went on with the follow-up. I
suppose I’m always looking for things like
that—the kind of elemental aspects of language that
are in music and in art and in politics and so
on.
NFC: What drew you to this area? You
started in what, composition and then conducting or
what?
Weigold: Yeah, I started studying
composition, conducting, piano, and then I don’t
know what drew me to it. It’s an interesting
question because I’ve got plenty of composer
friends who don’t enter this world at all. I think
what people say about me is that when I teach
composition, I teach the person as much as I teach the
craft of composition. So I’ve always been
people-centered within music. Unlike when I compose, I
conduct one oboist differently from another. Because one
is tall and tense and one’s short and relaxed, I
don’t give the same signal to each player
abstractly. I change the signal according to whom
I’m signaling. And some conductors don’t do
that; they just give more generalized
signals.
NFC: It also sounds like you’ve
always had an ability to be open and to not categorize
the person that you’ve met or are working
with.
Weigold: I try to do that,
yeah.
NFC: The way I try to explain it is to
have someone outside the room. Then I ask the person to
come in and then immediately ask the others, “Who,
what is this person?”
Weigold: Oh, nice one!
NFC: Because everyone immediately
starts to categorize them.
Weigold: Yeah and
stereotype.
NFC: And they decide who or what the
person is just by how they walk or how they’re
dressed—that sort of thing. So people rarely ever
see who actually came in.
Weigold: That’s a lovely
exercise.
NFC: It sounds as if you were brought
up—or it’s just an inborn quirk of your
chromosomes and genes or whatever—to not
automatically categorize people, which then turns out to
be a basic part of your ability to transfer that to other
people.
Weigold: People say I understand people well.
I find people fascinating and amusing and enjoyable to be
with. So I’ve got quite a strong communal aspect in
me.
NFC: That leads me to another
question. Engineers and musicians may have something very
much in common in the way they’ve chosen to express
themselves—the engineers through numbers and
technology and the musicians through an instrument. Do
you find that they both have difficulty in communicating
with people face-to-face?
Weigold: Musicians are classically that
way—open in one way, closed in another. They
communicate through their instrument, but they can be
very shy or just very undeveloped in terms of their
social and emotional communication.
NFC: That’s where I find
engineers and artists are almost
identical.
Weigold: It’s fascinating isn’t
it? I can think of a couple immediately—the freest
spirits with their music are full of passion, joy,
warmth, and love, and they can be really quite bitter and
twisted and nasty and aggressive away from their
instrument. And you can get artists—you know the
composer Steve Reich? He’s one of your best
composers, the American minimalist composer. He is a very
tough man. He’s not someone you’d cross very
safely. He once said, “People think great musicians
are great people; most of the great musicians I know are
bastards.”
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