On Sunday I went back to coach my friends in West London on the songs they will be taking to Llangollen International Eisteddfod in July. It’s amazing how fast four hours can zip by working on three songs! I was pleased to discover that they had really internalised the work we did last month on the blue notes in ‘At Last’ and made that feel their own, which freed us up to explore other aspects of the music.

On the way home, I spent quite a lot of time reflecting on the coaching process, and in particular the way that barbershop’s particular musical practices set up some significant cognitive challenges for singers.

The second of Robert Cialdini’s principles of persuasion is self-consistency. That is, people are more likely to go along with something if they perceive it as aligned with commitments they have already made. This one has a lot of potential for the choral director I think. It has power for both good and ill, so needs handling with care.

Well, my second semester musicianship class on vocal close harmony is over. The students have had 11 one-hour classes on a style that was completely new to them, and have each produced an arrangement which they’ll record in a quartet with three other students for their assignment. Consequently, my last class teaching activity for the year was working with the quartets to refine their performances prior to the recording session – a fine way to end the year in my view!

One of the things I have always enjoyed about this class is the way it combines specialist, technical learning with very holistic, general learning.

I spent a happy day on Saturday coaching Bristol Fashion chorus and their director of two years, Craig Kehoe. As I was there for the whole day, we had plenty of time to explore their music in some depth, including work on different types of swing, embellishment strategies, the relationship between emotion and vocal colour, as well as some of the more colourful harmonies.

The area I spent most time thinking about on the way home, though, was our exploration of the relationship between Craig’s gestures and the singers’ voices.

The first of Cialdini’s principles of influence is the idea that people are more likely to agree to something if they feel it is in return for something they have already received. This makes intuitive sense, of course. But an interesting twist to this is that people will feel indebted even if the thing they have been given was unsolicited, and even if it is something they’re not particularly interested in. This is why Hari Krishna people give flowers before soliciting donations. You may not want a flower, but once you’re holding it you don’t feel so comfortable about not giving anything in return.

So, what is the conductor’s version of giving someone a flower?

The standard method for arranging in the barbershop style sees three of the four parts constrained by particular rules. The lead has the tune, the bass goes below the lead and takes the root or the fifth of the chord, and the tenor should sit on top and move by small intervals, never greater than a fourth.

This means that the baritone part gets, as the cliché has it, all the left-over notes. It hops above and below the lead line to fill in the chord, and is constrained neither by rules of pitch content (it can take any note in the chord) nor type of movement (it can move by any interval). So it is defined entirely in negative terms – it is what all the other parts are not.

The cliché goes: Amateurs practice until they get it right; professional practice until they can’t get it wrong.

This is probably quite a good generalisation. What I find interesting is that I usually hear it from amateurs who have completely misinterpreted it. It is trotted out in support of a rehearsal strategy that involves endless drill and the desire to be able to ‘do it the same every time’.

Now, I’m not knocking reliability in performance. It’s good to know that you can produce the goods in front of an audience without screwing up. I’m just questioning (a) whether drill is the best strategy to achieve it and (b) whether it is the best use of rehearsal time. After all, as Kaplan points out, the goal of rehearsal is to change things, not to make them the same.

Robert Cialdini’s Influence is one of those useful books that gives a nice clear framework of ideas that can be applied in all sorts of situations. It presents findings from an extended research project dedicated to finding out what common techniques are used by people who are successful persuaders. There’s a good summary here.

I thought it might be useful to see how we might use some of these techniques to enhance our choral rehearsals. The musical director, after all, is in the business of persuading people to behave in particular ways, and we all find that some behaviours are easier to change than others. There are six themes that Cialdini explores: