The end of September marked the twentieth anniversary of the completion of my first book. It was another 18 months in production, so we’re a way off the two-decade milestone for publication, but in terms of the shape of my life, the submission of the manuscript is the more vivid memory.

When it came out, the two chapters that got the biggest response from within the barbershop community were those dealing with, respectively, gender and tag-singing. And there are ways in which both of those dimensions of barbershop culture have changed in the interim, and also ways in which they haven’t.

On the face of it, gender would appear to have seen the biggest changes, with the embracing of both mixed barbershop ensembles, and the increasing presence of men’s and women’s ensembles at the same events – whether competing against each other (as in the Barbershop Harmony Society, BinG!, and IABS), or in parallel contests with separate rankings (as in the European championships and SNOBS/Northern Lights joint conventions). My chapter title of ‘Separate but Equal?’ would be less of an immediately obvious choice today.

One of the biggest challenges that novice choral directors face is learning how to listen to the singers at the same time as directing them. It sounds so simple, written like that, and is clearly fundamental to the conductor’s task, but as people new to the activity invariably discover, it is easier said than done.

You see, we each only have the one brain each. And if that brain needs to pay a lot of attention to unfamiliar motor skills in the context of complex musical content, it doesn’t have very many cognitive resources left over to dedicate to the sound coming into it. As one acquires experience, the raw panic of overwhelm subsides, but the challenge remains. There is a lot going on when you conduct a choir – all those people singing at once, each with their specific musical and personal needs - and we still have only the one brain with which to process it all.

Last week, international barbershop had some big news: current International chorus champions, Music City Chorus from Nashville announced that they would no longer participate in Dixie District events while the District still kept that name. There have been ongoing discussions about the continued use of the Dixie label for this district over a number of years, and Music City Chorus’s decision came shortly after, and in response to, a decision to retain the name.

For those unfamiliar with the context of this, the Barbershop Harmony Society in the US and Canada is organised into a number of geographically-defined districts, each of which hold their own Conventions and educational events each year. These events both provide members the chance to be part of a musical community wider than their local chapters, and provide a qualification route to compete at International level. (‘International’ originally meant US and Canada, but now includes competitors from associate organisations from around the world.)

The concept of ‘influence’ is central to both academic and informal discourses about music. It serves as an explanatory narrative to make sense of how a particular artist’s work emerged with the particular traits it did. There’s quite a lot written about what it actually means, and how it might work, though in fact most people who talk about influence haven’t read much if any of that literature, and still manage to make sense to each other.

I am going to try not to get too distracted by that bigger-picture stuff today as there is a specific thing I want to reflect on: how discourses about female composers often talk about who influenced them, but rarely seem to credit them as having influence on other composers. Just as women are in the west traditionally named as adjuncts to men, taking their father’s then their husband’s names, our stories about female artists are patrilineal.

When I sat down to write today, I thought I was going to be using the title ‘the problem with cleaning’ to reflect on the way that the process of cleaning can have the effect of raising your standards of cleanliness, such that the job is never done. It’s not simply that it’s only when you’ve removed the film of dust over everything that you can see the stain on the carpet clearly. It’s that as you give it attention, you just keep noticing more that needs cleaning.

But as I started to write, the thoughts felt awfully familiar, and the search function reveals that I reflected on this experience as a metaphor for rehearsing back in 2011. (I should add that today isn’t the first time since then I’ve done any dusting.)

Saturday saw me back with my friends at Bristol A Cappella, coaching them for the first time since they stormed into a gold medal in the BABS mixed chorus contest in May. It is said that you start singing better the first time someone pins a medal on you, and there was definitely a new sense of assurance on show. They’ve always been an intelligent chorus, willing to engage with things that will help them improve, but the process of making those gains is quicker when the singers aren’t wondering whether they are capable of them.

Our task for the day was to work on four repertoire songs for their up-coming show to celebrate their 10th anniversary next month. It felt like the earliest times I worked with them, back before the barbershop mixed chorus existed, with a wider range of styles and repertoire, including a texturally-adventurous 8-parter. You can buy your tickets here: bit.ly/BAC10yearconcert

Clara Wieck (later Schumann) published her Op 5, 6, and 7 in 1836, having sent them all to the publisher in August, about a month before her 17th birthday. Op 5 and Op 6 are collections of pieces for solo piano, the former consisting of four character pieces with programmatic titles, the latter of six pieces identified by genre labels: Toccatina, Notturno, Ballade, Pollonaise, and two Mazurkas. Op 7 is her Piano Concerto.

I’m primarily interested in Op 6 at the moment, but it’s worth thinking about all three works together as they were published at the same time, and were being worked on in parallel. We don’t have a lot of evidence about their genesis (no autograph score of Op 6 has been found), but a handful of mentions in Clara’s diary* give us a few date stamps to work with. The catalogue of works in Nancy Reich’s biography is invaluable here; I am once again grateful to the hardcore musicologists who dig down deep and dirty into the source material and process it in ways that make it useful to those of us who come along afterwards with questions.

This post emerges from having a number of conversations over quite a long period of time, and noticing a pattern that needs interrogating. I don’t know if by the end of it I’ll have any answers, but I hope to have a better handle on the questions, which is arguably the most useful stage.

The conversations have been with choir directors, mostly (though not exclusively) of barbershop choruses, but all groups in which section leaders play a significant role in the groups’ processes for learning music. The choruses have included all-male, all-female and mixed groups, ensembles of a range of achievement levels, and are based in several different countries. What they have in common are reports of a particular dynamic within one of their sections, whereby the section as a whole is perceived as fragile, despite having a very strong singer for their leader.