The Fredösphere

The Iron Tongue of Midnight is a choir tour survivor.  She also survived Robert Shaw, who was known to conduct with a rubber truncheon:

Shaw had an obsession: he wanted every last rhythm to be perfectly precise, and we had been working more on notes, choral sound and the musical line than on perfect rhythmic precision.

He had a solution to that: he threw out everything we'd been working on and had us count all the rhythms, and sing them with numbers, mostly staccato, for the next several days.

He got more precise rhythms, all right, but at rather substantial cost. Most of the choristers were ready to kill him; I certainly was. The beautiful work that was emerging from the first, relatively chaotic rehearsal got lost under the precise rhythms. Our voices were starting to shred, too, from all the staccatto singing.

And Shaw, like his mentor Arturo Toscanini, had a temper. I understand that when he first saw what shape the group was in, he nearly stormed out and broke his contract. I think we would have had more fun if he had. There were a couple of impressive displays from him, in any event.

That's typical.  A good friend who is a very respected church music director in Ann Arbor told me this one:  a singer dies, goes to heaven, and asks permission to sing in the heavenly choir.  An angel ushers him into the choir rehearsal room, and he notices a famous blue cardigan sweater draped over the conductor's chair.  The singer is stunned.  "Does that mean what I think it means?  You guys are so lucky!"  The angel rolls his eyes.  "No, that's God's sweater.  He only thinks he's Robert Shaw."