That was pretty much the message of the episode. I've sung in several choirs, and not once did the director ever behave like Rachel did. And they never used batons, only their hands and words to direct us. Evidently Rachel was only aware of how orchestra conductors worked, rather than proper choir directors. There's a huge difference between people with musical instruments and singers.
However, we did sometimes have minor issues among the chorus in real life.
Sometimes the older women get territorial, for example, and get mad when a new person sat in "their" chair or their "friend's" chair. They'd form cliques too, just like teenagers.
We've never had a singer as bad as Steve Urkel, but I do recall this one guy in the tenor section of my last choir who only sang one note, but he wasn't loud enough to be heard over everyone else.
One of the more interesting issues my last choir director had to deal with was not singing or social friction; it was smell, of all things! Based on the gossip I heard, she was sensitive to strong smells (and probably was the only one in the room with that issue), and apparently several of the men in our tenor/bass section liked to bathe in cologne instead of taking actual showers, overdid it with musk, or apparently had lost their sense of smell years ago and kept piling on the deodorant. So the choir director had a very strict rule of us being a "scent-free" choir. Any violators would have to leave or face the wrath of the other choir singers for putting our director out of commission.
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