We’ve all been present at performances that made us squirm. We describe them as cringingly bad, as awkward, as embarrassing. Mostly we don’t think about them more than we have to – rather we get irritated at how the memory of them sticks around in our heads like a nasty taste or funny smell. But if we do stop to think about them at all, we usually put our response down to lack of skill on the performers’ part.

But we’ve also all been to performances that weren’t very skilled but that were nonetheless not embarrassing. We might be slightly patronising about them – calling them sweet, or heartfelt, or well-meaning – but we don’t resent the experience. Embarrassing performances are not just about lack of skill.

What I think is going on is based in the structure of empathy between performer and audience.

Something that I’ve found striking when training or coaching novice and/or amateur choral directors is how often they express a desire for ‘quick fixes’. I used to think of this as rather shallow, rather like wanting some kind of miracle pill to make you healthy and beautiful rather than making the effort to eat properly and take some exercise. Directing singers is a more holistic and deep-thinking activity than that, I thought.

Last year I had an experience while coaching a barbershop chorus that put the whole thing in a new light, however.

Magenta has been working on my arrangement of Night and Day recently, which has a lot of chromatic movement in the harmony parts (not my fault – Cole Porter wrote it that way). We’ve been tackling this by developing our sense of scale degrees, and the notes between them.

This is all part of my general campaign to encourage people to conceive pitch in terms of tonal context rather than in terms of intervals. I have had a clear rationale for this for some time, but recently had one of those revelatory experiences which made me realise why it was even more important in the case of semitones.

So, the basic reason to think in terms of scale degrees rather than intervals is to avoid the problem of transferred error.

The acappella blog has a regular feature of Dos & Don’ts which offers simple practical advice to performing groups. Occasionally, though, what looks on the surface like straightforward common sense turns out to have an interesting underside that is anything but straightforward. Mike Scalise's post on choosing gender-appropriate material for your group has had me thinking about it for the last two weeks.

At a practical level, the advice to choose music that fits the gender of your group is of course sensible. But two things interest me: the list of successful exceptions presented to nuance the argument, and the question of how we assign gender to songs in the first place.

Well, had I remembered I was going to be on the radio this morning, I'd have said something about it earlier. As it happens, I completely forgot until I got an email from a listener halfway through the programme!

But with the wonders of technology, we all get a chance to catch up on what we missed using the BBC's Listen Again function: Click here to hear the programme.

The programme is called 'Hairspray and Harmonies', and it follows the Birmingham ladies barbershop chorus to convention last year. My role is as talking head to give some context and background. There's a second instalment next Friday at 11:00.

F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854)When I was doing my PhD I came across the ideas Schelling developed in his early-19th-century philosophy of art. At the time I found them interesting for the purposes of the obsessions I had at the time (to do with gender and discourse and suchlike), but largely dismissed the ideas as waffly romantic claptrap typical of their day.

Like good ideas tend to do, though, they stuck around in my head over the years that followed until one day I suddenly realised how relevant they were to something I was currently obsessed with.

Okay, so I’m sure nobody ever chooses to breathe noisily on purpose, but it’s still irritating when you hear an otherwise reasonably enjoyable performance preceded and punctuated by the sounds like Davros from Dr Who.

There are multiple reasons why it is irritating.

‘Rehearsing a choir is like pushing a man up a greasy pole.’
John Bertalot

If you listen to how people talk about rehearsing, you’ll notice that there are a number of common metaphors that lurk behind what they say. Sometimes they are stated explicitly, but more often it’s just that the language people use comes from a particular domain. It’s useful to stop and analyse this language every so often, since the kinds of underlying metaphors we use to think about rehearsing affects how we go about it. Different ways of conceptualising the process bring different opportunities and limitations. Here are a few examples – I’d be interested to hear about others that you have spotted or use yourself.