Releasing the Badgers' Intuitive Musicianship

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 31st March 2026
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What is the collective noun for badgers?What is the collective noun for badgers?

I spent Saturday with Sporty Badger, Posh Badger, Scary Badger and Baby Badger, collectively known as Release the Badgers, working with them on their set for the upcoming LABBS Quartet Prelims contest. As you can imagine from their nomenclature choices, nothing silly happened at all. (Did you know that you can make any adjective more entertaining by inserting it before the word ‘badger’. You’re welcome.)

While their two songs contest songs are contrasted in mood and style, we found some common themes between them on areas that would benefit from TLC. This is useful for embedding skills: it means both that you get a good cost-per-wear on you work, since you can keep applying it in different musical contexts, and that these multiple opportunities for application give commensurately numerous opportunities for practice.

World Mixed Barbershop in Wuppertal

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 19th March 2026
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Wuppertal's glorious Historische Stadthalle: displaying flags from all 9 countries representedWuppertal's glorious Historische Stadthalle: displaying flags from all 9 countries represented

Last weekend saw mixed barbershop quartets and choruses from nine different countries converge to compete at the world mixed championships, hosted by Barbershop in Germany alongside their own national championships. The last time I made to BinG!’s Barbershopmusikfestival was in 2018 (we were booked also to go in 2020, but we all know how that turned out…). This was the occasion of the inaugural World Mixed chorus contest, and it is interesting to see how – and how much – things have changed in the interim.

The World Mixed quartet contest has been established for longer so the changes here are less dramatic, though it shares what was for me the headline development: mixed barbershop appears at last to have a handle on choice of key. For the first few years after the introduction of mixed ensembles at barbershop conventions I was consistently commenting on the challenges of finding a key that works for all voices in the group.

Slowing things down with SpecsAppeal

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Friday 13th March 2026
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specsappealmar26

I spent Sunday with SpecsAppeal working on a combination of things that were specific to the two songs they brought with them and things that will apply to everything they sing. Unlike my difficult-to-summarise exploration of musical detail in Scotland a couple of weeks ago, we found a clear theme emerging during the day that applied in multiple different contexts: the value of taking things slowly.

The first and most literal of these recurred throughout the day: blocking passages a chord at a time, taking time to make friends with each one before you move on. In a texture where you have a four-part chord for every melody note, there’s a lot of music going on, and your brain doesn’t have time to fully absorb it all as it flies by in tempo. If you stay with a chord until you can let go of your own note and attend to the whole, your brain can make sense of it, and provide all the microadjustments to tuning, balance, tone- and vowel-match to bring it into focus.

Getting More out of Melodies

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Sunday 8th March 2026
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I’ve been thinking a lot about melodic shape recently in the context of a couple of pieces Rainbow Voices are working on. Specifically, I’ve been wanting to catalogue a handful of features that are often found in melodies, that, once identified, offer clues to help make the most of the tune’s expressive potential. They’re all features that you may well respond to by feel, but by bringing them to conscious awareness, you can be more purposeful in how you approach them. The point is not to replace your intuition, that is, but to understand and thus enhance it.

I’ve written about some of these principles from an arranger’s perspective in the past; this post is following through to what the implications are for singers.

  • Long notes are there to feature the beauty of your voice. When you have a long note, there is nothing to do except be glorious, so use these opportunities to take the note on a journey of beauty and meaning. The most interesting moment in a long note is just before it finishes.
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