A Cappella

I spent Saturday in Milton Keynes where I had been asked to deliver a workshop on Vocal Health and Developing Resonance with Junction 14 Ladies A Cappella. I have worked with the group every so often over quite a few years, but always previously in the more standard coaching format. It made an interesting change to approach the day through a single theme. It was overall probably physically less tiring than a coaching day – there were many more opportunities to sit down – but also more cognitively tiring as we were dealing with information as well as skills.

The day was structured around exploring the fundamental elements of vocal craft, introduced in the order in which one needs to get them established in order to set up the instrument: body, breath, phonation and range in the morning, moving onto the resonant cavities in the afternoon. Each involved some sharing of concepts, some exploring in exercises, and some application to repertoire.

I have been thinking about perfect pitch for a couple of weeks since an interesting conversation about it with a barbershop friend. It’s one of those things that is often – well, usually – taken as an indicator of high musical skill, with connotations of special talent not vouchsafed to ordinary folk. Its very name suggests that it is not merely a Good Thing to have, but The Best. I think some of these assumptions bear a bit of interrogation.

First off, let’s think about what perfect pitch is: essentially an unusually reliable and accurate memory for pitch. It is a rare capacity when it manifests with the level of consistency that allows someone to identify and/or produce notes immediately and intuitively and be confident that they are right. But it is this consistency rather than the fact of pitch memory itself that is unusual.

When I last reflected on the category of ‘old barbershop’ eight years ago, I finished up by wondering what sounded normal then that would sound dated 20 years on. Well, it’s only eight years on, and I found myself thinking about perceptible cultural shifts again at the BABS Convention back in May.

My musings last time were mostly about musical things like approaches to voice-leading and embellishment and performance things like styles of body language in the context of continuous performance traditions. I did mention subject matter in passing, but only mentioned the most ostentatiously outmoded lyrics in defining the category of ‘old’.

Now, by contrast, I found myself observing a clear division in song storyline and lyric between those that evoked social relations that we would wish to promote these days in an organisation that celebrates diversity, equity and inclusion, and those in which the social relations feel uncomfortably old-school.

Anniversary quartet champions Fifth Element on their victory lap

The Spring bank holiday weekend saw the British Association of Barbershop Singers hold their annual Convention in Harrogate, at which they celebrated the organisation’s 50th anniversary. It was a full schedule, with long contests as well as shows and various other activities, and it would have been pretty much impossible to partake of everything on offer as well as catch-up with friends.

To mark the occasion, all quartets who wanted to compete had been invited to do so at the convention itself (rather than going through a preliminary round some months earlier to select the top tranche to compete on the big stage); this meant that Friday was completely filled with the quartet semi-finals. Fortunately, the first ever livestream broadcast of a BABS convention meant that those who were still travelling up during the day were able to keep tabs on what was happening en route. (I hope it was only the car passengers watching while actually on the move, but as everyone turned up alive, I assume this was the case!)

I spent a happy Saturday workshopping and coaching with the Sussex Harmonisers at the weekend. They have an interesting set-up: one club, with one board and music team, but two choruses, one male-voice, the other female-voice, which also currently share a director (though they haven’t always done so). The two choruses operate largely independently as ensembles, with separate rehearsal nights, but the shared infrastructure allows them to coordinate and collaborate on repertoire and performance plans.

Saturday was their first shared education event, and they devised a very effective model for it. In the morning, I worked with both choruses together in a workshop themed ‘The Listening Chorus’. Then after lunch, they took it in turns to have 45-minute sessions of coaching on songs from their respective repertoires, with the other chorus listening.

Sometimes you find a single overarching theme for a coaching visit encompasses a range of areas to work on that initially seem quite disparate. Having the chance to listen to the group in advance increases the chance of spotting this in time to set the agenda from the outset. Such was my experience with Women in Black in Berlin last weekend.

Their recordings from the previous week’s rehearsal revealed a chorus with a clear sense of expressive intent, bringing a lot of energy to their performance. (I learned afterwards that their previous coach, Lisa Rowbathan, had done a lot of work with them on story-telling; that this came over in the recordings as a conspicuous strength is a testimony to her effectiveness.) I arrived with the aspiration to help them harness that energy in a more focused fashion to help them realise that intent more efficiently, both so that they didn’t have to work so hard, and so that their intentions would be communicated with greater clarity.

I’m on record for feeling somewhat critical of the practice of choral breathing – that is, of singers in a choir managing their breathing points by breathing whenever they feel like, so long as it’s at a different time from their neighbours, and they do it in the middle of a vowel rather than shortening a syllable.

I have heard people promoting the idea in terms of vocal freedom, and actually this argument is a compelling one its favour. People are most likely to tense up and get anxious while singing when running out of breath, so if you remove that as something to worry about, they’ll sing with both greater emotional and physical freedom. I do like this rationale, though I am still concerned about the dissociation of technique from musical narrative, and the way that it actively prevents choral singing being a good training ground for solo singing and single-voice-per-part ensembles.

I’m coming back to the ideas Theo Hicks shared in his final plenary at the BABS/LABBS Directors Weekend back in January, as my first post on the subject produced some great discussion, but in a variety of different places. So I thought it worth bringing some of the points together, as people may not have seen all of each other’s interesting responses.

Michael Callahan said:

I’d be interested on an audience’s reception that is ignorant of musical aesthetics (which most audiences are).

If I understood Theo’s ideas correctly, the audience doesn’t need to be aware of any of the process behind the performance preparation, they just need to bring along their usual desire to listen to music. In much the way that listeners don’t need to know what the names of different chords are in order to feel their expressive flavour.