For the last year or so I have been attending tai chi classes in local parks. I tried it on a whim when I was looking for things to take me away from my screen, and have kept doing it both because it is enjoyable during the session and I always feel good afterwards. It’s good for a sense of balance, both physical and mental.

Recently our teacher, Perry, was making some interesting observations about breath and tempo in the context of the Form (the extended sequence of moves that always features in the last 15 minutes so of the class), and I found myself wanting to reflect on parallels with musicking. Breathing and tempo are, after all, pretty central to our craft too.

Shine on me

This probably won’t be a long one as I’m not sure I have much more to say than, ‘Uh, look at this, the record needs correcting,’ but we’ll see how we go.

We all know by now that barbershop was originally an African American genre (though there was a considerable level of interchange between white and black traditions in its heyday as a commercial genre in the early years of the recording industry). We also know that when a revivalist movement in the 1930s led to the formation of the Organisation Formerly Known As the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America (or TOFKASPEBSQSA as I like to think of it), the new institution not only excluded African Americans from its membership, but also systematically removed any mention of the genre’s black origins from its standard narratives.

It’s very easy to think that was all in the past and that now the historical record has been corrected we’re all done. Whereas in fact there are all kinds of ways in which we’re still living with the legacy of those decisions, usually without realising.

Continuing with the theme of how returning to regular piano practice is having interesting cross-fertilisations with my vocal-harmony musical brain, today I’m going to share some discoveries made while working on Margaret Bonds’ piece ‘Troubled Water’.

The piece is based on the spiritual ‘Wade in the Water’ and was originally conceived as one of a suite, though it has developed an independent life having been published as a stand-alone piece in 1967. The suite was finally published in its entirety in 2020. I have linked to Samantha Ege's recording;'Troubled Waters' is the 3rd movement, starting at 6:58.

The main benefit of online coaching: good screenshots of people laughing

I spent a rewarding afternoon on Thursday with a quartet who had contacted me for advice about how to manage rubato in an ensemble without a conductor. They formed from within a choir they all sing in so are accustomed to using the visual signals from their musical director to coordinate them, and were finding the lack of this external guide one of the major challenges of singing in quartet, especially in music that isn’t strictly in rhythm.

We split the process into two distinct stages: how to rehearse, and how to perform. The former is where the group develops a shared understanding of musical shape and a shared awareness of each other in the ensemble. The latter needs a repertoire of interpersonal cues to transfer those understandings into the performance situation.

This post arises from a collection of random notes in my Thinking Book and conversations on social media, none of which were substantial enough to make a post of their own, but would if bundled together. So, a bit of a miscellany, but at least a themed one.

Vocables are the nonsense/neutral sysllables we use in a cappella to create accompanying textures. They are sometimes intended to evoke instrumental textures explicitly, but they’re often simply about creating a distinctive expressive profile for a song and providing expressive variety over the course of the musical narrative.

Change vocable when you change pattern

One of the things that takes up an awful lot of rehearsal time when working with human beings, especially human beings who work in idioms that involve memorising music, is handling the bits where a pattern changes. You set up a riff, and then some pesky musical detail like how the melody goes or a change in chord means you have to mess with it – in the process, messing with the singers’ heads just as they’d got settled into their stride.

I mentioned a while back that I’ve been practising the piano regularly in 2022 for the first time in years. This has entailed a combination of reconnecting with past pianistic past skills gone rusty and developing skills in new ways that weren’t accessible to the younger me at previous stages in my musical journey.

It has also involved a parallel process of rediscovery and development in regard to the processes of practising. Last time I worked in any kind of structured way at the piano (as opposed to just playing the instrument every so often…and less and less often over the years…) I didn’t have the years of teaching and rehearsal experience I do now. So, I’m finding all kinds of interesting interchanges between my life helping others grow as musicians and my own efforts to re-establish some level of competence.

I have been reading Helen Walker-Hill’s splendid book From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and their Music, and learning many enlightening things. Today I’m going to share with you some of the thoughts of Undine Smith Moore. I already knew I liked her music, but it turns out that she was also a percipient cultural critic with many insights to share.

Two particular thoughts leapt out from Walker-Hill’s account, both to do with the way those who are excluded from a dominant culture can have a clearer view of that culture than those who are inside it. I’ll quote at length because the clarity of expression is part of what makes her clarity of thought so palpable:

My original plan was to use the actual label for today’s concept as my title, and use lime pickle as my primary metaphor to illustrate it. But after staring at a blank screen for a while I realised I don’t actually have a clear, precise label for this idea, so I’m going with Lime Pickle Principle as my title until I get this figured out. A label may emerge during the act of writing of course, but I won’t be bothered by then to go back and change the title and first paragraph so you’re stuck with the metaphorical title for now.

This concept emerged whilst coaching Amersham A Cappella the other week. The song we were working on is a really interesting one, in which the persona is incredibly vivid and engaging, but there are occasional whiffs that they might actually have a bit of a nasty streak to them. And this bit of friction in the sympathy is part of what makes it so engaging: you really want to identify with them, but also you’re a bit uncomfortable when you do.