Finding the Candy with Heartbeat

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heartbeatjul24

It is apparently over a decade since I last worked with Heartbeat (where did all that time go?!), and I see that back then I was remarking on the number of new faces that had arrived since my previous visit. This time I was struck by how many faces I recognised even after all this time; I don’t know how much of a chorus’s story you can infer from just two snapshots, but it does feel like there’s something in there.

Anyway, I remembered the chorus as being a lot of fun to work with, and that remains true. You can tell there’s a fundamental sense of up-for-it-ness in the room if on the first song you start work on you ask them, ‘Shall I be a complete bitch right from the get-go?’ and they all nod cheerfully. Accordingly we started out with an exercise that mercilessly reveals any and all flaws in rhythmic precision and found ourselves 10 minutes later with a much tighter execution.

We were working at this point on my arrangement of Candyman, which was originally commissioned by Eu4ia, the first British quartet to break into the top 20 at International level, for the barbershop showcase at the London Palladium back in 2009. It is thus a showy and intricate chart that requires a considerable level of vocal control in the individual singers, plus alert and responsive ensemble skills.

It is also one of the first arrangements in which I was really aware of writing parts for the voices and personalities of specific singers, and the decision-making process was all about producing lines and gestures that I could imagine those four individuals having fun with. When I’m coaching a chart that has this kind of history I like to share this aspect of the process, and barbershop being the small world it is quite often people will also know the individuals and can start to think through the lines through the lens of this personalisation.

In this case, all four of the quartet had been in Heartbeat for some years, and two still are, including their MD. So even the newest chorus members could participate imaginatively in this. And it brought a very concrete and personal edge to the game we played of ‘find the candy’. We had the singers turn in so they could see each other, and gave them the instruction to put their hands up whenever they had some candy. ‘Candy’ for our purposes was defined as ‘something you think an arranger might have put in for a particular singer to have fun with’.

(I can’t remember if I was using the phrase ‘handing round the candy’ for this approach to arranging before this song. It makes perfect sense in other contexts, candy being something it nice to share, so it may just be a coincidence that it is so apposite here.)

The point of this exercise isn’t simply for the person with the candy to identify it – after all they already know what’s in their part, even if they haven’t hitherto consciously categorised which moments were candy. The point is develop awareness of what everyone else is doing, so you know when to show off, and when to let someone else through to feature their special bits.

And the rewards are multiple. The singers have more fun, and they found it easier to sing when they could feed off each other. The audience gets a clearer listening experience – more vivid and textured as the detail comes to life. And you find that a lot more dynamic variety emerges without having to talk about it very much as people response intuitively to the overall musical shape.

We also tapped into people’s intuitive musicianship via raising awareness of the musical whole in our work on their contest ballad. Sometimes the goal was bringing a chord or progression into focus that wasn’t quite gelled, sometimes it was about finding the expressive purpose of a particular chord, sometimes both at once. In all cases, though, we approached it through the singers’ ears. As people developed more insight into how their part worked the others, and learned who they particularly needed to connect with at any given moment, they made adjustments to tuning, tone, and balance that were far more subtle than you could achieve if you were trying to change your sound consciously.

While I’m thinking about it, I’d like to share the observation we made about David Wright’s particular brilliance in the use of chord choice to create a complex emotional narrative. He takes the same limited selection of chords that all other arrangers working within the contest system do and makes them sound fresh and surprising and meaningful. I always feel I come home a better musician when I’ve been coaching his charts.

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