Our special management forms

Approach to music

Everyone of us does not like to take an initiative conducting M.A.B., because singing in M.A.B. is more interesting than conducting M.A.B.. There is any pianists in M.A.B. because we do not have regular place to practice. These situations made our style, ``Singing a cappella male choruses without any conductors''. Moreover, this style also means that we consider each one of us as not only a singer but also a music director.

The style above mentioned leads us to unique practices. During our practices, everyone suggests what he wish to do. It is a very interesting thing that we discuss about these kinds of suggestions in practices. Sometimes we discuss most of time without singing. We repeatedly sing and discuss until we reach out goal which is oriented not by one particular character's taste, but by all of M.A.B. member's. We are all satisfied with this way of directing music. So we continue singing without conductors.

Singing without conductors, we could only rely on the ears and eyes to decide the time to begin, the time to finish, the measure of tempo and etc. In this reason, we practice in a circle and looking at each other. This feeling that everyone is a soloist and such a practice method make us to sing in an arc, sometimes it almost looks like in a semi-circle on our stages.

In general feeling, overrunning the planned time is not ought to. However we do not consider that it is an absolute rule. When we getting stir up our feeling while singing, we sometimes lose track of the time. In this case, it is better for us not to make any special rules, and we believe that we probably never need some rules. We continuously quest for the ideal way of management standing on everyone's conscience.

The way to vote

We often discuss management ways in our group. In the condition, we usually use the ``M.A.B. Janken System''. Janken is a Japanese traditional toss system and called rock, paper, scissors system in English. In our system, ``Rock'' means for the voting, ``Paper'' means against, and ``Scissors'' mean neutral. We consider that it is a very realistic voting system because of the avoidance of being affected by others and of the permit of abstention positively.

We all understand the limitation of our voting system. That is why in some cases we change our decisions. We understand the problems that occur in case of coordinating all opinions too. We understand the reason why the problems arise. It is called ``Sweat shirt Theory'' among ourselves and cared during discussion. Concerning for voting, we constantly attempted to discover better ways.

Using Internet

e-mail

In condition that we were all students of Tokyo Institute of Technology, we started using e-mail at an early stage as Japan networking environment. We also started using our mailing list on August 20th in 1991 and we have been using this system actively. The mailing list has no additional manners or rules to JUNET. (JUNET is one of pioneers of Japanese Internet, such as USENET in U.S.A.). We use the mailing list for discussion, contact or score delivery produced by MusicTeX. We frequently argue many topics besides music.

In early years of our mailing list, using e-mail was not wide spread. That is why some of the members not connected to Internet made a small conference room in a commercial network named NIFTY SERVE to exchange information. In September 1992, NIFTY SERVE began a service to exchange mails to Internet. Recently Internet providers for personal use become popular. And now almost all of our members can exchange information in the mailing list.

As time goes by, most of us graduated the institute and even some of the members left Tokyo. However the networking environment still works to connect us.

This mailing system is managed by Takashi YOSHIMURA in ETL, AIST, MITI.

World Wide Web

In condition that Internet comes into the limelight, it was natural for us to open this site. We hope this site to be the announcement of our activity, to be the source of information and to become one of our new infrastructures.
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