One of the things that happens when you are a barbershop judge is that you get to hear multiple performances of the same arrangement. (You get it as an audience member too, but you get it more as a judge as you can’t pop out for a beer and a sandwich during the early afternoon session.) And sometimes you notice over repeated hearings that certain arrangements seem consistently to elicit sub-optimal performances.

These are arrangements that, on the face of it look fine. If there were obvious technical or artistic flaws with them, they wouldn’t get picked up by lots of groups. So it takes quite a few hearings to notice that whenever ensembles sing them, they always perform better in the other song – they’re more synchronised, better in tune and more naturally expressive. I’m not going to name specific arrangements, as I don’t think that would be polite. Rather I’ll just invite you to compile your own lists from your own listening experiences.

Since writing earlier in the year about the effectiveness of duetting as a coaching and rehearsal tool, I’ve been reflecting again on why it works so well. One key point about it is that it’s not about the people who are singing – it’s the people who are listening who have the chance to grow. It offers people the opportunity to learn about the inner workings of the music they sing – how the parts around them interact – and also about the voices of their fellow singers – tone colour, vibrato, vowel shapes, expressive nuances.

But what is interesting is what the brain then goes on to do with all that information.

John Bertalot produces a wonderful description of the rehearsal process in his book How to be a Successful Choir Director. He says:

The leading of practices is like pushing a man up a greasy pole. He goes up with a bit of effort, but slides down naturally when you leave him alone.

I like this metaphor not just because it is vivid and surprising – and therefore expressive and memorable – but because it is rich enough to tell us things beyond the immediate message it is presented to convey.

When we talk about ‘balancing’ a chord, we usually think of this as a metaphor to express the optimum volume relationships between its constituent notes. I’ve been thinking recently, though, that we could take the metaphor a little more seriously and replace the discourse of amplitude with that of whose job it is to anchor the chord in place – which is the load-bearing part, perhaps.

Archibald Davison's 1940 book Choral Conducting was published 28 years after he took over the directorship of the Harvard Glee Club. In it, he makes an interesting distinction between what he calls ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ tone. It’s interesting for all sorts of reasons – both because it is a useful distinction to be able to make in working with a choir, and because of the ambiguities present in the way he develops the idea.

It starts off as an aesthetic distinction deriving from the relationship between choral tone and musical intent. Subjective tone, he says, ‘results from and is an inseparable component of the whole musical situation of which it is just a part. It characterizes the text in its varying implications and conveys the singers’ feelings in regard to that text.’ Objective tone, by contrast, is a technical achievement; it is the product of a focus on tone itself independent of musical context.

A reasonably common point of debate within amateur choirs is whether the point is to have fun or to perform well. For the fun-faction, the requirements of choral discipline (watching the conductor, enunciating the text, not chatting all the time) are frustrating because they dampen the spirits and inhibit people’s enjoyment of a social occasion. For the performance posse, all the chattage and talkery and not following instructions very reliably is frustrating because it inhibits their opportunity for a flow experience and the specifically musical pleasures available from a really clean choral sound.

I suspect there are several things going on within this debate. One is a choral version of the difference in orientation between the people-focused and task-focused that you meet in any walk of life. Some people care about singing with other people because it’s singing with other people, while others are interested in singing with other people.

I recently came across a post on the Dilbert Blog in which Scott Adams was toying with the idea of developing a theory of flavour analogous with musical structures of pitch:

I believe that flavor can also be reduced to a set of engineering guidelines. Specifically, I think you could categorize most flavors the way you categorize music, with high notes and low notes. Garlic and onions and pepper feel like low notes to me, whereas lemon and cilantro are like high notes. I've noticed that the best food has a combination of both, just like music. I'll bet an experienced chef could categorize most flavors in a way that would allow you to know if you were breaking any rules, such as cooking with all low notes. And I'll bet the high notes can't be more than say 10% of what you experience, in some subjective sense, without overwhelming the flavor.

Now I found this interesting in several dimensions.

Well, I suppose the first question is whether we do in fact perform better to a bigger audience. I’ve not tested this hypothesis at all rigorously, but it does feel like a good generalisation. A full house seems to bring with it a sense of occasion that encourages performers to step up to the mark and do their stuff more extrovertly, with greater panache. A sparse smattering of listeners seems to sap the spirit very slightly, and a performance that is just as thoroughly prepared and technically competent can feel like it lacks a little something.