Back in Bournemouth with BABS

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Wednesday 31st May 2023
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Trailblazers blazing their trail: pic courtesy of the BABS social media peepsTrailblazers blazing their trail: pic courtesy of the BABS social media peeps

The British Association of Barbershop Singers’ annual convention this year was back on its traditional spot of the last weekend in May, and also back in the venue where I had my first encounter with the genre as a living tradition 27 years ago. Strange that I’m now one of the middle-aged ones who has been involved for years, but that’s apparently what happens when time passes.

Anyhow, this felt more like a ‘normal’ convention than last year’s. This was partly a function of the event itself – we had more choruses back in the contests, for example (though many still diminished in number). But it was probably more a function of how we are. Whether to hug or not is back to being a matter of the nature of a relationship rather than a negotiation of risk comfort levels, and we’ve gone back to only ageing one year between conventions, so the changes in our friends are more subtle, and of an order we are accustomed to.

Finding the Moments

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 25th May 2023
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I wrote a while back about the experience of listening out for our favourite bits in familiar music, and the obligations thus placed upon performers to make those eagerly-anticipated moments special. This opened up the question as to how we identify which moments these are if we’re new to the repertoire – either because we’re relatively junior in the genre or because the music itself is not yet widely performed.

That’s a good question, I thought, and then: hmm, that’s a really good question, how do we do this? What looked on first sight like a nice rhetorical question to which I thought I knew the answer actually had me more baffled than I anticipated.

On the Discomforts of Relaxation

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Friday 19th May 2023
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There’s an anecdote in one of F.M. Alexander’s books in which he tells of a child he was working with who had had very restricted mobility because of extreme habitual muscular tension. Using the techniques he had originally developed to deal with his own problems with bodily coordination, Alexander unwrangled much of this tension, bringing her body into a much more neutral alignment. Her response was to complain about how strange she felt.

I have been thinking about this story recently in the context of my own challenges in rebuilding my relationship with the piano. Some of my technical work has involved refining what I do with my hands and fingers, but most of it is about not doing stuff with my shoulders, back, glutes, legs, and (more weirdly, as I have got deeper into this process) intercostals muscles and muscles deep in my abdomen.

Embracing our Superpowers with Fascinating Rhythm

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Monday 15th May 2023
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Warming up with clapping gamesWarming up with clapping games

On Thursday I went down to follow up on the session I did with Fascinating Rhythmand their director Jo Thorn back in February. They have spent the intervening 10 weeks or so embedding the shift in dynamic between conductor and chorus, and the singers reported feeling both more secure and more personally expressive now that Jo is doing less, but with greater precision and nuance.

We started off by building on this work by clarifying some of the ways to think about the conductor-choir bond. Rather than thinking in terms of Jo ‘displaying’ how the music needs to go, we thought in terms of the chorus throwing the music into her hands for her to shape. The singers experienced this as being given more ownership over the expression, while Jo developed a concept of the music as a ball of energy in her hands. This shift in attention away from what her body was doing to what she was doing with the music helped her both relax more and hear more.

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