I recently received an email asking if I would be 'willing to provide a 'musical brief' that will increase my understanding and handling of your arrangement'. I found this a somewhat baffling request, not least because the arrangement in question seemed to me relatively straightforward and I didn't know what it was that the person didn't already know. After all, isn't the performer's job to figure out how the music goes, and then perform that?

So my reply was to ask her to write what she thought it should be, and I'd tell if I thought she'd got the wrong end of the stick. This way, she'd get a brief that dealt with what it was she needed to know, and moreover, the knowledge would be stronger and more useful because she had generated it herself. (I am reminded of Nicholas Cook's point that reading someone else's musical analysis is a bit like asking someone to do your piano practice for you.)

I recently received a message in response to my posts on Transactional Analysis last winter. (The message was actually sent back in December, but I only discovered the 'Other' inbox in Facebook this week. Fortunately most of the of the other messages I had missed were either advertisements for concerts or spam, so I haven't been rude to too many people in my ignorance.) It was from a choir director who mostly has a good relationship with her singers, but was encountering some difficult behaviour from one of them. In her own words:

My problem is one choir member who constantly breaks the flow of energy by making inappropriate comments, mocking my choice of songs, using the group as a platform for his political beliefs and generally distracting people from enjoying the singing. I have tried to discuss the issue with him a number of times but he claims to have no understanding of what my problem is.

Most people I have spoken to either don't understand my problem or, if they have any experience of running groups themselves they tell me to kick him out. I don't want to ask him to leave as he has been coming for as long as the choir has been going - 10 years - his wife also comes and I realise that the group is a very important part of the lives of everyone who comes along.

Scott Dorsey, over on ChoralNet, has a nice blog post about the usefulness of having a fresh pair of ears in your rehearsal room. I liked it not only because he promotes the kinds of services I offer (!) but also because it got me thinking about breadth and depth of perception, and how we balance these out.

Scott uses a delightful metaphor coined by a postgraduate class-mate of 'flaming pink hippos' as representing the glaring and obvious problems that you gradually lose the ability to see the closer you get to your work. You get so focused on paying deep attention to one aspect, that you totally fail to notice much more fundamental issues developing elsewhere.

Believability is a widely-valued attribute in the performance of song. We value a sense of honesty, of authenticity; we like to experience the performance as a genuine act of communication, of music speaking 'from the heart, to the heart'. The point of bringing music 'to life' in performance is not just to go through the motions, but to generate meaning and interpersonal connection.

One of the standard ways to coach people in how to create this experience is to ask the performer(s) themselves to believe in what they're singing. 'You've got to believe it yourself if you want your audience to believe it,' is one phrase of which I have been on the receiving end. This is fine as a starting point, but it carries some problems with it:

Do you ever have the experience in rehearsal where people are singing the right note, but it's sitting just a shade too high or too low for the chord to gel? If you spend any time at all working a cappella, I bet you do (if you don't, you lead a charmed life).

I’m not talking about your regular, run of the mill tuning issues here, caused by tiredness, habit or faulty vocal production. I’m talking about a specific kind of fault where an ensemble that is basically in tune horizontally doesn’t always nail the vertical tuning.

Now, you can address this problem at an analytical level, asking people to nudge their note up or down a bit to get it into true. But this approach has drawbacks:

I wrote some years ago in general about the concept of mental rehearsal - that is, the act of running through an event in your imagination to practise how it going to go. And it is a technique I have been using more recently in my workshops on managing performance nerves. A recent session with Magenta brought out some interesting and useful side-effects of the technique, which I have been finding helpful to reflect upon.

The exercise was designed to introduce the technique as something for the singers to take away and use as part of their individual preparation for a festival performance. (And, indeed, the festival itself is serving as a medium to focus upon and develop techniques that can apply to all our performances.) The first part was undertaken sitting down, with our eyes closed.

I had an email last week from a director who is grappling with two interrelated issues that I am sure will resonate with a lot of my readers:

• Singers who have signed up to perform at an event dropping out as the event gets closer
• Singers texting him before rehearsals with apologies during the time he is trying to get 'into the zone'

In both cases, the problem he identified - rather perceptively I thought - was the effect on his mood. He feels frustrated by these actions, and demotivated. He recognises that this response doesn't help his chorus, and so is looking for ways to manage his own emotions.

The concept of work-life balance is a useful one in that world of competitive workaholicism that so many First World people seem to inhabit these days. But it rather assumes that you can tell which is which. How you define 'work' is only ever unproblematic if you are in a full-time salaried post and - possibly more important - don't think about it too much.

The standard concept of 'work' as economic activity is tricky, as any feminist will tell you, for two related reasons. First, it devalues domestic labour; being a stay-at-home mum is not the same as 'not working'. Second, it renders the second shift of women in employment invisible, hiding the inequalities in relationships that persist in the face of ostensible equality in the workplace.

Musicians have an interesting variant of this critique, in that one's most artistically significant work is not necessarily the best paid. Particularly in your early career, the bread-and-butter routine work is there to subsidise those projects where you develop most as a musician, and make your most distinctive contributions. The most extreme example of this: you don't get paid to practise, but that's still the bedrock that all other musical activity is built upon.