Some years I ago I wrote about a concept developed in Tara McPherson’s book Reconstructing Dixie: lenticular vision. It is a metaphor derived from the visual arts, and she deploys it to articulate the way that from the 1950s onwards the white-supremacist cultural systems of the American South increasingly hid the extent to which they were built on the oppression of Black people.

In a world where the Civil Rights movement meant that the open depiction of racial hierarchies was becoming subject to critique, the White response was often the erasure of African Americans. This created a fiction that the remaining cultural patterns ‘just happened’ to be White, rather than having been built by violence, segregation, and the appropriation of labour.

I have been thinking about this again recently in the context of a specific song which I was asked to arrange: ‘Moses’ from Singin’ in the Rain. In the movie, it is a tap-dancing extravanganza that emerges out of the mockery of a fusty old acting teacher, and the social world it inhabits is entirely Caucasian.

The Rainbow Voices contingent just after our festival concert

I’m writing this on my way home from a trip with a group of singers from Rainbow Voices to Brussels to participate in Various Voices, a huge international festival for LGBT+ choirs. Its four days were packed with concerts by individual choirs running simultaneously in several venues, plus informal street concerts, and major shows at the end of each day, interleaved with a variety of social events and workshops.

It was an incredibly rich experience. There was so much that I found engaging, informative, and emotionally satisfying in my professional roles as musician and musicologist; not to mention simply as a human being (which obviously I only attempt on an amateur basis). I am trying to record some thoughts while the experience is still fresh but finding it hard to sort out what to think about first, there is so much to process.

Today’s post presents an opinion that I have been harbouring for a while, but a combination of things has brought me to the point of taking the time to articulate it. The time invested in this blog post will hopefully save me time in writing emails when discussing arrangement commissions, as well as giving space to develop the ideas more fully than one usually does in correspondence.

So, the doo-doo intros that I am specifically done-done with are those appended to songs intended for barbershop contest. Back in the day of course one never heard them, as the general imperative for homophony excluded passages with vocables entirely, but as things have loosened up in the last 10-15 years, there has been a willingness to accept small doses of other textures, and a concomitant profusion of songs that begin with doo-doo introductions.

Here we all are in silhouette...

I last visited the Barberettes in Reading 26 years ago, and I think I may have been the only person there on Saturday who remembered the event. I had been sent there by LABBS to coach, shortly before I certified as a judge in the Music Category, and I recall I had recently decided it would be useful to be able to sing what we now call an Icicle 7thin a descending cascade, a skill I used for the first time on that visit and again on my return visit last weekend. I was right, it is a useful thing to be able to do.

A snapshot of the pre-convention set-up: let's not forget the behind-the-scenes efforts that make all the performances possible

Summer arrived suddenly in the UK at the end of last week, just in time for the annual convention of the British Association of Barbershop Singers. I was only there for one day again this year, as Rainbow Voices were performing at Birmingham Pride on the Friday night, but as it turned out, the changes in the convention schedule this year meant that I could see all the quartet contests, not just the national finals on the Sunday. The same changes meant however that I saw none of the choruses, so everything I know about those contests is entirely second-hand. Fortunately, when you turn up in Harrogate on a convention weekend, it doesn’t take long before you meet someone in the street to report on what you missed.

During her keynote address at LABBS Harmony College, Blair Brown briefly explored the issue of the gestures singers use in performance. It came in the context of the over-riding principle that our performances should be honest and meaningful, that we should bring our best selves to the stage in order generate a genuine human encounter with our listeners.

All too often, she observed, a singer’s gestures can become conventionalised, using standard forms that thus appear to betoken a sense of ‘I’m doing this because it’s what people do,’ rather than being personally meaningful. Blair described the style of ‘churning’ hands one often sees in quartet performances as ‘transactional’ and attributed its use to a desire to impress rather than to connect. As such, it can be a barrier to communication.

I have been thinking a lot recently about repertoire choice in terms of an ensemble’s (or for that matter a solo performer’s) relationship with themselves and with their audience. This is in part a response to a point in Blair Brown’s keynote address at LABBS Harmony College, and in part with the way it both resonated and dissonated with a conversation I had just been having with a member of Rainbow Voices. I find myself with two imperatives in play, each valid, but on the face of it in direct opposition to each other.

Blair’s comments on repertoire choice were couched in terms of personal authenticity. She recommended choosing songs with which you feel a personal connection, so that you can sing them honestly. This isn’t just about you and your comfort, however, but about your obligations to your listeners. If they are vouchsafing their attention to you, they deserve a genuine experience of human connection. Don’t put yourself in the position where you have to bullshit your audience, is how she memorably (and indeed quotably) put it.

It’s a good long while since I’ve written about musical charisma, which was one of my regular topics of interest in the early years of this blog. If I’d stayed in academia, that would have been the area for my next scholarly monograph, emerging out of ideas I had to leave to one side as I wrote my book on choral conducting. But Blair Brown’s keynote speech at LABBS Harmony College got me thinking about it again.

In general culture, we tend to regard charisma as something that inheres to the individual, as a special or magical quality. However, the sociology of charisma suggests that it is something that is experienced in particular circumstances, arising from the relationships between members of a group as well as with its leader. Certainly some people are more adept at galvanising charismatic experiences within these circumstances, and indeed at facilitating their set-up, but they do it using somewhat standardised – and thus analysable – techniques rather than by any inherent magic. (Though as we shall see later, the belief in this magic is implicated in making a group susceptible to charismatic encounters.)