Various Voices 2026 – Initial Responses

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.

The first observation to rise to the top is one I found myself repeatedly noticing over the course of the events: how strong the overlap between repertoire presented during the festival and that featured in show repertoire in the barbershop community. In pretty much every programme I witnessed that included Anglo-American pop, rock or show tunes, there were at least one, sometimes several that I had either arranged myself or know of a version by another barbershop arranger.*

The reason I find this particularly notable is that, historically (certainly 20 years ago when my book came out), barbershop has had a very heteronormative culture. Whilst this is much less the case now, many of the overlap songs have been well-established in the barbershop repertoire since before this culture shift.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this observation, except possibly to hypothesise that common musical preferences may have facilitated the cultural changes that make the barbershop world much more LGBT+ friendly than in yesteryear. I also note that the overlap is strong in non-contest repertoire only; there were very few songs that you’d find in the more regulated barbershop canon. Actually, there may be some interesting thoughts to be had there about the categories of ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ and how they play out in socio-musical discourses, but that’s a rabbit hole I don’t have the cognitive stamina to dive down right now.

Another observation I made repeatedly is how much I enjoyed listening to music in different languages. This was partly linguistic pleaure: seeing how much I could make sense of songs in French, German and Italian where I have some experience in the language but not necessarily the contextual knowledge to make sense of the kind of poetic turns of phrase you get in song lyrics.

But it was also a musical pleasure. Whether or not I understood any of a particular language, I found myself responding to the distinctive musicality that lives in the word sounds themselves, irrespective of meaning. (Though I’m sure that meaning is part of what enables a choir to enliven these sounds; you can hear the story-telling even when you don’t understand the story.) It heightened my awareness of the way that vowel colour interacts with melody, and the crunch of consonants with rhythm and metre, to the extent that I started noticing it afresh in the English-language material Rainbow Voices were performing in our own concert.

The other thing I found myself thinking about frequently was about the relationship between technical accomplishment and emotional response. Obviously, the more skilled a group is, the more complex the music they can tackle, and the greater the beauty they can achieve. We heard some wonderful exhibitions of choral craft that gave us much to aspire to.

But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy the performances by groups that have yet to achieve that high level of control. The sense of intent, the desire to connect and to share a love of music was still palpable, and the performances commensurately touching. I guess I didn’t necessarily feel inspired by the less technically impressive performances, but I still felt enriched by them, felt that it was a blessing to be sung to.

And both of those dimensions are important things to take away from an event like this. From the conversations in the RV group chat for the event, it is evident that everyone was having their imaginations ignited with the possibilities opening up in front of us as we witnessed others’ performances. And I hope that will spur us on to collective artistic growth over the coming months and years. The more beauty, pizzazz and poignancy that we can create, the more we encourage others to believe in the creation of beauty, pizzazz and poignancy.

But while we are still on our journey to greater technical assurance, and to fulfilling the ambitions it will allow us to achieve, it is important that we remember that the feelings of love and connection that can (and indeed should) be evoked at any and every stage of that journey. We don’t need to fear being judged for our shortcomings while we are still less accomplished than the role-models we wish to emulate; so long as we sing with honesty and intent we will succeed in our aim of putting smiles on faces and joy into hearts.

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* Weirdly, the one exception I can think of is Rainbow Voices’ own programme for the event. But our summer concert programme last year included four that are included in my catalogue, only one of which was actually my chart, the rest having been in the choir’s library from before my time. So I’d say the generalisation still holds.