I recently received a letter from one of my city's fabulous arts organisations about a major musical event planned for 2014. I am going to have a grump in a minute, but it's not about the general wonderfulness of this organisation or the specific value of this project, which looks genuinely artistically exciting. The letter was inviting me to a meeting to learn how choirs from across the city could participate.

Now, maybe I am just feeling jaded because I live in a city that has a lot of great arts organisations, and so I get a lot of these invitations, but they are starting to irritate me, and I have taken a little time to work out why. On the face of it, what could be wrong with the chance to join up with other people with whom we have artistic interests in common to make a special event happen? Massed voice events are inherently exciting, and it's good for our sense of civic community to do stuff together.

But the thing is this: these are high-profile events, run by funded organisations, but effectively subsidised by the unfunded community groups upon which they rely for participants.

I have written several times on various aspects of choosing music to perform and/or to arrange. These have covered both technical and artistic criteria, and also given some ideas about process - not just what to look for but how to go about looking. I had an email conversation recently, though, with a chorus director who was looking to commission an arrangement that opened up an area right in the middle of the issues I have previously covered, but which I haven’t actually written about: which specific features should she advise her chorus members to look out for in a song that would mark it as suitable for a cappella arrangement?

Now, I used to dedicate a whole class to this question when I used to teach a course on Vocal Close Harmony at Birmingham Conservatoire. So my first instinct was just to dig out those notes and post ‘em up. But, four years on from when I last taught that course, and more years than that since I taught it in the format that included that session, I can find no trace of those notes. Deep sigh. So, we’ll have to do the thinking again from scratch.

Years ago, Jonathan and I took some ballroom dancing classes. It was fun it its way, but the classes weren't very good because we were simply taught a set sequence of steps for each dance without any guidance on how you would vary them in different circumstances. So we could never quick-step in a room smaller than the one we learned in, for instance, because we'd have hit the wall before we got to the turn.

I am reminded of this sometimes when working with amateur singers who have learned their music by a rote method such as learning tracks. They may have a strong and accurate grasp of the notes (the big benefit of this approach), but they lack the mental flexibility to hold the music in their heads and change their performance of it at the same time.

When I was taking my classes in stand-up comedy last year, every week a couple of participants would present their work-in-progress to the group in a show-and-tell session. One particular in-class performance taught me some useful things about the way that a state of arousal speeds up your thought processes.

The performer in question would say some of his prepared material, and then immediately start to elaborate on it - spontaneously adding extra ideas, answering back to himself - as he had these thoughts on the spot. All the spaces where the audience should have had time to respond by laughing were filled up with this extra layer of commentary that had emerged in the moment of performance.

My recent post about Technologies of the Self got me thinking about Robert Dilts' hierarchical model of 'neurological levels'. I mentioned this in passing in my post on neurolinguistic programming back in the autumn as something I've been thinking about blogging about for ages. Well, the time has come, because I think it offers quite a useful way to think about these 'technologies' from a practical perspective, rather than the theoretical context Foucault was working in.

First what this is. The Dilts pyramid is a model of personal change. It consists of a series of levels, each of which is constituted from, while also constraining, the one below. Hence, your capabilities define which behaviours you are able to engage in, but are also made up from your behaviours to date. And you only gain new capabilities by engaging in new behaviours.

As I threatened in my recent post in which I had a somewhat tangential rant arising from Deke Sharon's defence of imperfection, I have also had some thoughts about his central point, that a cappella has become too obsessed with tuning.

Now, this plugs into well-established discourses of musical taste, which I have written about before. The unfinished, the unpolished acts as a signifier of honesty and authenticity. A perfectly-schooled facial expression and impeccable etiquette can hide secret thoughts - it may be diplomatic, but is it to be trusted?

Heinrich NeuhausI was thinking after a recent bout of piano practice about the way Heinrich Neuhaus apparently framed his teaching. There are three areas of knowledge you need, he contended: you need to know the music, you need to know the instrument, and you need to know yourself. I don't know the flavour of this usage of 'to know' in Russian, but it seems, when rendered into English, to imply both savoir and connaitre in French. Which is interesting in itself, but not what I was intending to write about.

What I find interesting about this concept of learning pianism is how different it is from the technique-focused approach typified by Jozsef Gat. Gat goes into endless detail about the mechanics of fingers and arms, joints and levers, whereas Neuhaus just leaves these as an empty gap in the middle, between that which is played and that which plays. It feels akin to the school of thought in conducting that says (I paraphrase), 'Bugger stick technique, you need to study the work and study the orchestra'.

Emotion has a funny relationship with the nature/nurture divide. We tend to think of it as purely natural, since a lot of our emotional responses are involuntary. If it just happens to us without the intervention of our own will, it can't be a learned response, we assume. We categorise it more with digestion than with language acquisition.

And indeed, there is a substrate of primary emotional states that are cross-cultural. Joy, fear, anger, grief - we can recognise these states in people with whom we have nothing in common but our shared humanity.

But when we talk about feelings evoked by the arts, we are usually not talking about these pure forms. The emotions a novel or a symphony inspire are more subtle, mixed, contextual. And for all that 18th-century guff about music being a 'universal language', not everyone makes sense of an unfamiliar musical style on first acquaintance. Primary emotions, like the need to eat, may be universal, but the way we celebrate their full possibilities in culture develop local cuisines.