January 2023

Exploring Recurrent Themes with Bristol A Cappella

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 26th January 2023

Some days you find similar concepts coming up repeatedly in different musical contexts; Saturday was such a day with my friends at Bristol A Cappella. One of the advantages of days like this is that you find people get quicker at applying the concepts on successive encounters, and indeed that after a while you no longer have to point out where they need to apply them, as they’re figuring it out for themselves.

One theme for the day was of staying with a note right to the end of the phrase. Linguistically, the brain pretty much moves on when you get to the last syllable of a sentence; in general conversation we don’t tend to elongate them, but go straight to drawing breath for the next utterance. But when singing, it is very audible when the attention has moved on, even if people are holding the note for the notated length. You have to stay interested in it for the tone to retain integrity.

Tuning in to BABS Directors Academy

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 19th January 2023

Jay's selfie captures to joy in the room

The weekend saw the first in-person BABS Directors Academy since 2020 (and my first since 2019, as I missed the last one). We had Dr Jay Dougherty as our guest educator, who brings with him a deep and abiding understanding of the barbershop style along with higher degrees and HE teaching experience in choral conducting. He is probably most known in the barbershop world for having taken over Joe Liles’s ‘Tune it or Die’ course at Harmony University, which he has made his own by drawing on research undertaken in his doctoral studies. He led front and centre with this material, dedicating three consecutive sessions on Saturday to it.

Top Tips for the Older Voice

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Saturday 14th January 2023

Today’s title is the subject line of an email I received recently from LABBS Chair, Natalie Feddon. She had been out and about visiting choruses, as is her wont, and had met with a group of ladies whose average age is a shade over 80, and asked me on their behalf if I had any technical advice for their singers, with an eye also to supporting the many other association members round the country who are singing joyfully into their later years.

So, the first and most important thing, they are already doing: keep singing! Singing is like any other skill: the best way to maintain it is to use it regularly. That said, both physical and cognitive capacities do become more fragile with advancing years, so things we once took for granted might over time need a little more care.

So, I’ll start with a general principle, and then make some specific practical suggestions.

An Anatomy of Errors

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Saturday 7th January 2023

One of my favourite phrases when rehearsing or coaching is ‘if nobody is making mistakes, nobody is learning’. Of course, it’s not the making of mistakes per se that constitutes the learning process, it’s the process of putting them right. Another phrase I over-use is ‘self-correction is my favourite sound in rehearsal’.

Anyhow, as I have mentioned periodically, I’m practising the piano regularly these days for the first time in years (decades) and as such am making a shed-load of mistakes of my own. They fall into a number of discrete and identifiable categories, and it would help my learning to enumerate them. And as this blog is where I do my learning in public, you can join in. You may recognise some as ones you make, or perhaps you make other, different types that I should aspire to.

(Another over-used phrase: ‘The goal is to avoid making the same old mistakes, but to strive to make new, more interesting ones.’)

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