A Cappella

I spent a happy afternoon on Wednesday with a quartet called the Tone Rangers. They are experienced performers, having been together for quite a few years, and whilst they don’t participate in the national barbershop contest scene, they enjoy competing in local festivals to give themselves a challenge. They arrived with some specific musical-problem solving to do, and we interspersed this with exploring a number of other areas of vocal development and musical detail.

The specific problem-solving related to the rhythm in a particular passage in one of their songs. And in addressing it we thought quite a lot about not just what needed to happen with the rhythm, but what needed to happen in their brains to get the results of our problem-solving secure. Because the thing about tricky passages is that you spend a good deal of time on them, which can result in the unsuccessful way of doing them getting very well-practised in. The challenge is therefore not just in learning the new way of doing things, but in forgetting the old way.

Today’s post presents an opinion that I have been harbouring for a while, but a combination of things has brought me to the point of taking the time to articulate it. The time invested in this blog post will hopefully save me time in writing emails when discussing arrangement commissions, as well as giving space to develop the ideas more fully than one usually does in correspondence.

So, the doo-doo intros that I am specifically done-done with are those appended to songs intended for barbershop contest. Back in the day of course one never heard them, as the general imperative for homophony excluded passages with vocables entirely, but as things have loosened up in the last 10-15 years, there has been a willingness to accept small doses of other textures, and a concomitant profusion of songs that begin with doo-doo introductions.

Here we all are in silhouette...

I last visited the Barberettes in Reading 26 years ago, and I think I may have been the only person there on Saturday who remembered the event. I had been sent there by LABBS to coach, shortly before I certified as a judge in the Music Category, and I recall I had recently decided it would be useful to be able to sing what we now call an Icicle 7thin a descending cascade, a skill I used for the first time on that visit and again on my return visit last weekend. I was right, it is a useful thing to be able to do.

A snapshot of the pre-convention set-up: let's not forget the behind-the-scenes efforts that make all the performances possible

Summer arrived suddenly in the UK at the end of last week, just in time for the annual convention of the British Association of Barbershop Singers. I was only there for one day again this year, as Rainbow Voices were performing at Birmingham Pride on the Friday night, but as it turned out, the changes in the convention schedule this year meant that I could see all the quartet contests, not just the national finals on the Sunday. The same changes meant however that I saw none of the choruses, so everything I know about those contests is entirely second-hand. Fortunately, when you turn up in Harrogate on a convention weekend, it doesn’t take long before you meet someone in the street to report on what you missed.

During her keynote address at LABBS Harmony College, Blair Brown briefly explored the issue of the gestures singers use in performance. It came in the context of the over-riding principle that our performances should be honest and meaningful, that we should bring our best selves to the stage in order generate a genuine human encounter with our listeners.

All too often, she observed, a singer’s gestures can become conventionalised, using standard forms that thus appear to betoken a sense of ‘I’m doing this because it’s what people do,’ rather than being personally meaningful. Blair described the style of ‘churning’ hands one often sees in quartet performances as ‘transactional’ and attributed its use to a desire to impress rather than to connect. As such, it can be a barrier to communication.

What is the collective noun for Harmony College Faculty?

The weekend saw about 300 members of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers gather together in Nottingham to nourish each other by learning together, making music, and fostering friendships old and new. You can tell by the terms of that headline description that it was a richly satisfying experience in many ways: if you were to analyse it in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs you’d be ticking boxes all the way up from Safety to Self Actualisation.

As a result I have piles of notes to sort through and it may take me some time to digest and organise all the ideas the event generated, so for today I’m just going to reflect on some of the things that helped the event leave us with such a glow.

I sometimes dither over titles, so when someone says, ‘You should make that the title for your blog post about tonight,’ I am more than happy to take the suggestion. It will take some explanation to establish why this was one of the key ideas to emerge from my recent coaching session with Fascinating Rhythm, but we will get there in due course.

Long-time readers will know that I have had a long and happy relationship with this chorus, who went through a phase of commissioning new contest material from me every year, and then inviting me to coach them on it. This pattern was disrupted first by covid and the subsequent rebuild, and more recently by a director change. Their new MD, Wendy Howse, is settled in now though and they are rediscovering their delight in bringing never-previously-heard arrangements to sing to their peers at Convention.

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.