Motivating the Moves with the Chordettes

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 20th September 2018
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chordettessep18Sunday took me down to Devon to revisit the Chordettes in the run up to their contest performance at the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention next month. In the three months since I last saw them they have embedded many of the things we worked on back in June, especially their bubbling embouchure and bucket-cup-teaspoon breathing, and were ready to move onto coaching more focused on the audience experience in anticipation of bringing their songs to the stage.

Sculpting a Story with Bristol A Cappella

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Sunday 16th September 2018
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Traditional warm-up picTraditional warm-up picI spent last Sunday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella helping them in their preparation for the Irish Association of Barbershop Singers Convention next month. As with my last visit, they had spent the previous day with Sandra Lea-Riley working on the Performance dimension of the package, which this time included the most ambitious choreography the group have embarked on to date.

Sandra had helped them refine their concepts and sharpen up their execution, but at the point I arrived they still needed more time on it to get it embedded. My remit was therefore to help them reconnect their visual performance with their vocal performance.

Exploring Character and Narrative in Norwich

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Wednesday 12th September 2018
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NHsep18

I spent Saturday with my friends at Norwich Harmony further developing the contest set I had last worked with them on back in May. Unsurprisingly, given the elapsed time between visits, we could now build on the work we did last time on rhythm and harmony to explore how these elements contributed to the communicative dimensions of characterisation and story-telling.

We approached their up-tempo number as if it were a movie. Some songs strongly suggest a time, a place and even a filmic genre, and once you locate a song in this way, you have a common fund of imagery and associations that you can all draw on. One of the disadvantages of a cappella is that you don’t have a range of instrumental timbres to enhance the vividness of your performance; the commensurate advantage is that you have the imaginative freedom to build in opulent special effects to your concept without all the fuss of hiring an actual orchestra.

Tag-Singing, Inhabitance, Ratio, and Flow

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Saturday 8th September 2018
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With thanks to Manoj for the pic: also do check out his tagsWith thanks to Manoj for the pic: also do check out his tags

The two most talked-about chapters of my barbershop book were those on gender and those on tag-singing. Having given a lot of attention to the former theme at Harmony University, I have some thoughts about the latter to share. In particular, how the activity of tag-singing, in its natural habitat, embodies many of the qualities that we were discussing in my classes on Techniques for Effective Rehearsing.

As anyone who has acquired this addiction knows, tag-singing is the secret pleasure of barbershop. It’s not very secret; we don’t purposely hide it away (though small groups of us may go and huddle in a stairwell to create our own private sonic space to enjoy it in). But you wouldn’t know about it by going to public-facing events – it’s what goes on after hours, when the formal activities have finished and people just want to hang out with each other.

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