Excellence

Steel City Voices - LABBS 2025 ChampionsThis year’s national convention of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers was set to be an exciting one from the outset, as we knew going into it that we would be seeing a new champion chorus for the first time in nearly 20 years. Since Signature’s win in 2006, the title has been shared between Amersham A Cappella, The Cheshire Chord Company and the White Rosettes, none of whom were competing this year.

The absence of the big three this year was a direct consequence of the affiliation agreement with the Barbershop Harmony Society that has allowed LABBS groups to compete that their International Convention. The White Rosettes made history as the first to represent LABBS on the international stage in 2025, and this July both Cheshire Chord Company and Amersham A Cappella were invited to participate.

I spent Saturday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella, revisiting their set from the European and BABS Conventions back in May in preparation for the World Mixed Chorus contest in Germany next Spring. By now they are deeply familiar with the music and their performance plans for it, and this presents the opportunity to do the kind of deep work that only becomes possible when you no longer have to focus on what you are doing and can direct your attention to the how.

Much of our work focused on listening techniques, finding ways to enhance everyone’s perception of what they were doing, since the first stage of refining your execution is increasing the acuity with which you hear the detail. Duetting inevitably played a part in this, with a lot of micro-adjustments making themselves through the process in addition to the explicit observations singers made as we walked through the process.

My second post on this subject tackled the ‘well what do I actually do?’ part of the question about how to deepen our interpretations. And whilst it came up with a bunch of things that I know to be useful and effective in developing imaginative and expressive musical performance, taken together they don’t add up to a total of ‘deep interpretation’. It’s like if someone asks you why you love your life’s companion, you can list lots of things about them that you adore, but the fact of your love is always more than the sum of those parts.

[Looks across the room at Jonathan, smiles fondly, but decides not to interrupt him just now to tell him about the examples I considered including but decided were unnecessary for the argument. I’ll tell him over dinner tonight instead. If you know him you can probably guess anyway.]

Having explored in my last post the question of what it means to develop our interpretation of a piece of music, it is time to turn our attention to what we actually do to make this happen. Using the distinction between ‘interpretation’ as meaning our imaginative understanding of a piece, and as meaning our concrete performance actions to make it audible, I am going to divide this up into to categories: things we do with our brains and things we do with our bodies. Of course, the two are only ever notionally separable, but when you’re thinking about something that keeps throwing up more tangents you need some kind of organising principle to hold the ideas together.

I’m also focusing on activities that can work either as individual study or as group activities. The relationship between a conductor’s understanding of a piece and the overall insight in performance is a whole other interesting set of questions that I am not going to get into today.

I had an interesting question by email recently from a barbershop director about how to go about deepening her chorus’s interpretation of a song. It came out of some feedback from Convention judges, who had considered their interpretation to be somewhat simplistic at times, and advising them to develop it by exploring the song’s layers. The director was finding it hard to know exactly what to do in response, saying:

As a song we'd sung for so long, we'd got to a point where we were all confident in our own interp, so I'm not sure any of us will have any new ideas as we felt our interp was appropriate. Yes we can get a coach into work on it and breathe new life into it, but I do worry that will simply upset the chorus that we have a version we like.

In my first post about Molly Gebrian’s book on the neuroscience of music practice, I mentioned resonances with the ideas of the Inner Game. Interestingly, the friend who recommended this book to me was keen to keep the two separate – whilst not knocking what Inner Game principles can offer, he saw this book as much more practical and task-focused than the psychological orientation of the Inner Game.

And I agree that is a useful distinction to make. Nonetheless, as someone who enjoys finding connections, I found in a number of places that Gebrian’s suggestions for practice strategies were not only reminiscent of various aspects of the Inner Game, but also helped explain why they work. So I’ve found it helpful to work through some of these connections.

In my last post I gave an overview of Molly Gebrian’s excellent book on the neuroscience of practising music. Today I turn my attention to a number of specific concepts she shares that help us understand why we experience particular types of learning experience as effective or ineffective.

Contextual Interference

This is the term used to describe the extra cognitive load that comes with switching between tasks. This is why it feels comfortable to get stuck in and stay with one piece of music for extended periods during our practice. However, as we know, what is comfortable isn’t always the optimal learning experience, and Gebrian recommends using contextual interference strategically in order to make our brains work harder in practice. Finding ways to randomise what’s coming up, and using a timer to schedule regular changes of task make us dig deeper at each change-over. It will probably feel like we’re not doing so well than we feel after a long stint on one piece, but it results in better performances.

With apologies to Molly Gebrian, the author of the book I’m about to recommend, but what with the cover image and the subtitle about neuroscience my own brain seems irrevocably committed to making her name into a subject-relevant anagram.

TL;DR: Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician's Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing is an excellent book, and you should read it.

Molly Gebrian is a viola player who also spent a lot of her student years studying neuroscience, and has since spent her professional life finding useful practical applications for that extra study to help herself, her students, and now the rest of us too. She presents clear explanations of what’s going on in our brains during various aspects of the learning process, and works through the implications for how we can use our practice time most effectively.