Some years ago, a colleague, who had been a prominent member of the Halle, told me of the way his orchestra manager had endeavoured to encourage players onto the platform by yelling 'Thank you, Please!', the curiously contradictory formulation which forms the title of this piece. From my perspective, the conjunction had an instantaneous and disconcerting resonance to do with panic, confusion, and the whittling away of ill-humour via grating civility.

In truth, concert, orchestra or performance management (the terms at conservatoire level are annoyingly interchangeable) is a thankless business. It is a received wisdom that middle-management personnel are the recipients of detritus generated in the hallowed pavilions where dwell their more illustrious peers but, perhaps because their work connects on a pretty well full time basis with public doings, the nature of manifest disapproval from on high, is especially invidious and voluble. If we factor in the strangely equivocal stance which must be adopted vis a vis students (i.e. born of the need to marshal forces with a certain gravitas yet simultaneously to be at their disposal), then it is scarcely surprising that adaptability is not enough; here, schizophrenia presents as some kind of desideratum.

One's own persona cannot, of course, be wholly disregarded and I came to administration a pompous and somewhat curmudgeonly 26 year old, full of a sense of my own musical wisdom and wearing my portliness like a hallmark of worldly experience. When I was interviewed for the post of Music Assistant at the Guildhall School by the then Principal, he made the point that I seemed to have about me a certain ponderousness which might prove to be at odds with the kind of fleet-footed, panting enthusiasm which he evidently thought contingent on the role. I would seem to have convinced him of my essential sprightliness, however, and after a most unsavoury interlude with an apparently unbalanced double bass professor (I use this term in the loosest possible sense), I settled down to a life of work sheets, registers, low-level budgeting and the disposal of music.

The great learning curve here was to do with the subtle manipulation of portering staff for whom one had to adopt coarse modes of speech and focus on football and sex at very regular intervals. (This was not, in itself, a great hardship, I must admit.) Only then would the two gnome-like individuals bestir themselves to shunt about the gargantuan stands housed in the Guildhall Music Hall. Most events occurred in situ (a blessing of which I had no real sense at the time) and provided one stood up for oneself in the face of the more menopausal or ulcer-ridden conductors, it was certainly not implausible to more or less enjoy the course of one's working life, especially as my relative youth meant that interaction with my charges, was by no means a rarity.

The shop floor is not necessarily a bad place to be. You can hide from authority and exaggerate, up to a point, the degree of your industriousness. After a late session, you can retire to the pub, untrammeled at this point by the shrill call of domestic responsibility. I was already beginning to learn that perceived eccentricity could act as a major plus and that people would either cultivate you or steer clear in the face of your outrŽ vocabulary, solemn rhetoric or overall unpredictability.

There were two of us, and when my affable colleague made a switch to the BBC, I experienced a moment of self-doubt. What, after all, was I achieving? In what sense was this post the "stepping stone" that all and sundry chose to label it? How could I undertake trips to Vienna and Prague, eat at the best restaurants and entertain bevies of scantily clad starlets of stage and screen in my luxury pad in St John's Wood, on the sort of salary that would make a lavatory attendant double up with laughter.

I duly resigned and took up the post at Trinity College of Music where I remained (in the orchestral department, at least) for rather more than 20 years. The substantial salary increase and relatively posh title notwithstanding, I was floored (indeed, entirely horrified) by the fact that the three members of staff responsible for the rehearsal and mounting of concerts were required to set up and clear paraphernalia. Here, the polarisation which I discussed above, presented as acute. At one moment, I was upbraiding a student for tardiness with all the baroque verbiage at my disposal, at the next I was hauling podia and tubular bells about and sweating like a pig as I did so.

Still, ensconced in my own office and with only 5 or 6 sessions a week to supervise, I was able to add a little private enterprise to my weekly work-load, notching up the odd journalistic piece, putting the finishing touches to a markedly vile string quartet, engaging colleagues in conversations about almost anything in the world except the mechanics of musical performance Ð a topic which I may as well tell you now, has always been of scant interest to me. (I mean, in the final analysis, who really cares how much it costs to hire an anvil for Mahler's 6th Symphony; the point is, is it a worthwhile piece and how well was it despatched.)

The appointment of a new Principal after some 4 years gave me the chance I'd been waiting for. I was the beneficiary of a particularly gratifying example of enlightened management when he entrusted to me the orchestra's artistic directorship by letting me not only select works but also hand-pick conductors as if I were visiting a french fruit market.

How my friends cheered as I foisted on them my favourite Mozart symphonies and concertos and how I basked in the glow of (admittedly, marginal) creativity! I have absolutely no idea at all if this situation is replicated in the profession or, indeed, if junior administrators at other colleges are or have been given, such licence. But this was, without doubt, my golden age as an administrator.

Naturally, it could not last. In due course, the age of missions and visions was upon us and I was left (no doubt, quite rightly) with the job of making certain that concerts (and the odd opera) happened without mishap. The brief was broad and encompassed registering students, drawing up schedules, keeping a yearly diary, looking to FOH and backstage management, overseeing a budget, organising student help (the self-help mode which had applied when I first joined Trinity had long since been dispensed with), selecting personnel and putting together programmes.

Given the massive intensification of the operation, there was little time to pursue novel writing and, if inspecting venues and booking coaches and cabs provided only nominal degrees of satisfaction, then at least I was taken seriously enough to be entrusted with fee negotiation and found myself insulated from the more violent horrors of performance thanks to the support given me by a trusty and slowly expanding staff.

And this raises an interesting issue. One of my assistants went off some years ago to immerse herself in a professional environment with the BBC Philharmonic. Another came to performance management from the schoolroom. Another is certainly determined to find a glitzier niche in the same field after a decent stretch of time. Does this not imply that (as a parochial Malvolio might have averred) some are born to management and some have management thrust upon them?

I was of the "thrust upon them" variety and, as if in recognition of this, in due course found myself redundant. The feeling was that I was somehow wasted in management and that my incipient pedagogical and writing skills should be given free rein. I suspect that a subtext also existed and that this was to do with new brooms, new styles, new energy and malleability levels and Ð dare one even suggest it Ð age.

In short, you need, I believe, to emerge from the womb with a willingness to take a subsidiary place when the great protocols of performance are rumbling and heaving into action. This was never my way. You need to be fastidious and, most importantly, to believe that what you are being fastidious about matters more than God and all His Saints.

This was never my way. You need to be all things to all men. No thank you very much. You need to be physically fit and infinitely generous with your time. ErrrrÉ.? And you need to be young because when youth is on your side, you can pretend to a modicum of concern when a second cor anglais is missing or if a conductor has the wrong kind of blueberry juice at the interval. I am no longer young and have been found out. If I bemoan my age more than my wife and others can tolerate, this, at least, is something I can celebrate. Thank you, please

Jeff Joseph

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