People are, perversely, more motivated by the threat of losing or missing out on something than on gaining something. This is why advertising campaigns that say ‘Hurry! Only two whatevers remaining!’ work. People don’t want to miss out on their chance to gain a whatever if there are only two of them left, while they wouldn’t be bothered one way or the other if they could go get plentiful whatevers at their own leisure.

So, how does this impact on our work with choirs? As I mentioned in this post, it is something that we fight against if we have a regular rehearsal slot and other, competing events come along as a one-off. People would much rather skip a rehearsal (of which there will be another next week) than miss anything that will never happen again.

There are ways that we can leverage this principle, though, to get greater commitment from our singers:

Having spent the last decade producing close-harmony arrangements for 4-part, single-sex ensembles, I’m starting to get interested in how to arrange for 8-part, mixed groups. Part of this is driven by demand – I’ve seen female and male quartets sing together often enough to notice that there’s a need for repertoire. Moreover, when I hear those performances, my response is almost always either (a) oh wow, that sounds great, I want to do that too! or (b) OMG that’s such a hokey chart, surely there must be better music out there!

Both of those are the kind of response to make me want to play this game.

So I’ve been looking at the various approaches other arrangers take, and here is my preliminary list of how you might go about this.

There is a school of thought that sees equal temperament as a Bad Thing. It is presented as a kind of industrialisation of a natural process, imposing a new regulative order on the west’s approach to music, commodifying our ways of hearing at the same time as mass-production processes were applied to pianos and popular songs.

For example, this is what the Just Intonation Network has to say on the matter:

Cialdini’s fourth principle of persuasion is in my view one of the most powerful. When people are trying to work out what to do, they look around them and see what other people are doing, and join in. For all we human beings pride ourselves on our individualism, in times of uncertainty we retain a strong affinity with the sheep.

This is why it can be so hard to change a choir’s habits.

Old SchoolOne of the highlights of the BABS Convention in Llandudno last weekend was the masterclass by International bronze quartet medallists, Old School. This is a quartet made up of singers who have been highly successful in previous quartets - I lose count of how many previous medals they have collected between them over the last twenty years. Their current mission is not merely to be successful in contest, however, but to be successful in contest with really traditional barbershop songs and arrangements. And it would be hard to find four voices better suited to remind the world of the sheer sonic pleasure available from this kind of purist approach.

There were two particular things from the masterclass that I put by for later mulling-over:

I spent last weekend at the British Association of Barbershop Singers annual Convention, which this year was held in Llandudno. It was a rich and stimulating weekend with much both to learn from and to warm the heart – both musically and socially. And the setting was gorgeous – it would be easy to have a very pleasant weekend there even without a couple of thousand of your friends to sing with!

I came out of the quartet semi-finals on Friday night with some interesting observations about the relationship between stage presence and vocal resonance.

Authority is perhaps the most obvious principle of persuasion, and the one the conductor relies on as a matter of course. People are more likely to comply with people they consider to be credible as experts or leaders. So, getting the job title of Musical Director goes a long way to helping you get your way in rehearsal.

It’s not always as simple as that of course. This principle relies on its effectiveness not so much on the actual expertise of the authority (useful as that will be in all sorts of ways), but about their perceived expertise. Whether or not their estimation of skill is accurate, a choir member who doubts your capacity to do the job undermines your legitimacy, and thus your power to persuade. It can be as arbitrary as thinking that a woman should not be directing a male chorus (yes, that has happened to me).

Jonathan Rathbone working with Serenata
One of the things I discovered when sorting through my notes from the Sing A Cappella day at the end of March was a whole collection of comments by Jonathan Rathbone on the subject of breath-points. It seemed appropriate to bring them all together into a themed post, since, while each is interesting in its own right, when piled up together they give a more developed sense of his musical perspective.