I had a trip down to Kent on Saturday to do an afternoon’s workshop with Diversity Choir on the theme of ‘Expressive Performance and the Musical Imagination’ as part of their annual retreat. We built the workshop around the music they are preparing for their concert next month, on the principle that, since the goal was to explore methods to enhance the communicative impact of the choir’s performances, the most direct way to do this was to develop them in the context of music they will performing in the near future.

We approached the workshop through the ideas of the Manager and the Communicator. These are always useful concepts, but you notice it particularly when you are working with music that is only partway through the rehearsal process. You need the Manager on duty a good deal of the time for this stage of learning, but it is also the right moment to give an explicit role to the Communicator, so that the performers’ mental map of the song has meaning, imagination and imagery built in to it, rather than just layered on top of a technical learning process.

Through the looking-glass...Thursday evening took me down to Bristol for a follow-up visit to Avon Harmony. I last worked with them in September, and it was gratifying to both them and me that I could hear a distinct difference made by all the work they have put in during the intervening six weeks. In particular, I noticed that not only were they much better at bubbling than before, but also all the skills that bubbling develops had improved too - continuity of breath, forward placement of tone.

The balance of coaching shifted from last time so that I was working much more through their director, Alex, rather than directly with the chorus. Since we last worked together, he has developed a much more controlled and specific gestural style, losing a lot of the distractions that his energy had been introducing. There was more of a sense of technique to be refined than the raw musical intention he had previously been running on.

On Wednesday night I was down in West London to work with Capital Connection in the first of a series of three visits planned for November. It's a chorus I know quite well, but it's been a little while since I've heard them, so found myself with a pleasing combination of a previously-established trust that comes from familiarity with a freshness of listening that comes from distance.

It also creates an interestingly different dynamic when you know you are going to be following up again shortly from when any repeat visit is going to be some months away. The process of prioritising changes when you can decide to pursue something now or to leave it until next time. You can have a sense of developing an agenda that spreads beyond the one session, setting some processes in motion to return to again, while reserving other things for later, knowing they'll respond more effectively to attention once the highest priority areas are more established.

The new convention venueThe weekend saw the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers assemble at the Telford International Centre for their 36th Annual Convention. This was the first convention at this venue and, while in some ways it wasn't ideal (such as the limited availability of hotel space in walking distance), it did provide a very kind and honest stage for the singers to perform on. All the ensembles sounded like they were able to produce what they had prepared there without distraction and everyone I spoke to confirmed they had experienced it as a good performance environment. The team running the sound system deserve to feel very pleased with their work over the weekend.

I have written before about the cultural discomfort with women singing loudly, and how some successful female singers have dealt with this. I'm going to get more pointed today, though, and specifically criticise the habit of some male coaches of systematically and radically reducing the volume at which the women they are working with sing.

First, I'm going to go out on a limb and say there is no such thing, in an absolute sense, as 'too loud' when you're talking about the unamplified human voice. When Isobel Baillie said, 'Never sing louder than lovely,' that was a statement about relative qualities, not absolutes.

The conducting literature has a somewhat uncertain relationship with the concept of charisma. It is a quality that is in many ways central to the maestro myth, but actual conductors writing about their craft show a degree of mistrust about it. Charisma can be seen to be tricksy, manipulative, or a worrying tendency to 'believe your own bullshit'.*

There are three elements in particular that quite reasonably arouse mistrust:

• The hijacking of the executive function: one of the more disturbing studies on the neurology of charisma showed how, when people believe they are in the presence of a charismatic leader, they suppress the use of their critical faculties in a manner akin to hypnosis
• The potential for tyranny: the need for strong top-down control to keep the emotional energies in charismatic groups from breaking the group apart concentrates a lot of power in the leader’s hands
• Charisma’s inherently expansionist agenda: charismatic groups are inherently proselytising - they set themselves up against the mainstream, and then seek converts. They are not, therefore, necessarily very comfortable neighbours

For my recent visit to Ireland Unlimited, part of my brief was to work with the chorus on the concept of ‘tension and release’. This is one of those useful notions we bandy about all the time, though it’s not until you have to explain them that you stop and think about them in detail. So these are some of the thoughts I had when I was preparing this session.

The metaphor of tension and release in music is a surprisingly global one. It works in multiple dimensions both musically and experientially.

So, in emotional or experiential terms we might think of it as:

Anticipation – Arrival
Unstable – Stable
Exertion – Relaxation
Desire – Fulfilment

I spent Saturday morning with the West Midlands Police Choir in central Birmingham, doing a half-day bespoke workshop on the theme of Developing the Ensemble. I have to say that, whilst my recent adventures have been most exciting, it was lovely to be working on my home patch for a change. It is quite a novelty to lead an event like this and still be home in time for lunch.

Within the major theme of how you turn a group of individuals, each with their own heart, brain and voice into a single performing unit, we had two main areas of focus: finding common approaches to using the voice, and opening up the ears and sense of mutual awareness between the singers.