I had a holiday this summer on the Isle of Wight that was blissfully relaxing except for the relentlessness consistency of the playlists. Whether it was in pubs, cafés and restaurants, at tourist attractions, in the live sets performed twice a week down the road from our holiday let, blasting out of open car windows, or through Bluetooth speakers on the beach, the vast majority of the songs were from the late seventies or eighties, interspersed with the occasional sixties tune. Even when we found an ice cream parlour by the beach that had a much more current sound world, about half the tunes in their playlist were covers or remixes of 80s tunes.

Now, I was an eighties kid, and I like a lot of this music, but it turns out that if that’s all I hear for three weeks, I start to get a bit stir crazy. I have been listening to a lot of jazz and classical music since I got home to cleanse my aural palate, and hope I will be able to re-engage with the era again in due course once I have recovered from the overindulgence.

It is with sadness and regret that I announce my resignation as the MD of Rainbow Voices. I had much rewarding music-making with the choir, and have come to feel deeply fond of many of the lovely singers I have had the privilege to work with there.

I spent a happy afternoon on Wednesday with a quartet called the Tone Rangers. They are experienced performers, having been together for quite a few years, and whilst they don’t participate in the national barbershop contest scene, they enjoy competing in local festivals to give themselves a challenge. They arrived with some specific musical-problem solving to do, and we interspersed this with exploring a number of other areas of vocal development and musical detail.

The specific problem-solving related to the rhythm in a particular passage in one of their songs. And in addressing it we thought quite a lot about not just what needed to happen with the rhythm, but what needed to happen in their brains to get the results of our problem-solving secure. Because the thing about tricky passages is that you spend a good deal of time on them, which can result in the unsuccessful way of doing them getting very well-practised in. The challenge is therefore not just in learning the new way of doing things, but in forgetting the old way.

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.