March 2019

Musings on the Leading Edge of Time….

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Friday 29th March 2019

In several of her novels that explore time travel, Sheri S Tepper develops the idea that the boundary between the now and recent history is unclear. Nobody really knows exactly what has happened when it has only just happened; it takes time to settle down. In The Family Tree it is this uncertainty that makes time travel possible: you can slip through time where it is still soft, before it has solidified. In Beauty, it creates ‘the present horizon’ which means that it takes a lot of energy to power your time machine through all the turbulence of what has just happened into the recent past, but much less to travel from there back through the centuries.

On Musical Decluttering

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Sunday 24th March 2019

When Marie Kondo’s book first came out a few years back, enough of my friends were reading and discussing it that I got a decent feel for her method without having to try to find room on my crowded bookshelves for my own copy. Actually I imagine this would be a self-correcting problem in this context, but still, I have the benefit of some friends who give very detailed synopses of things they are interested in, so they saved me the trouble.

Now that she has a TV programme, my social media newsfeed is once more full of her ideas, though now mostly parodied as memes about which key signatures do or don’t spark joy. There’s a comment in there somewhere on the difference between books and television, and the modes of discourse they promote.

But through the frivolity, I have been musing on ways we need to declutter our musical lives. The first way is the more obvious: how do we decide which repertoire to stop rehearsing and performing?

Building the Toolkit with Aurora Quartet

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 19th March 2019

Last Sunday brought Aurora Quartet round for an afternoon’s coaching. They are a recently formed quartet, two of whom have little prior quartetting experience, so whilst the content of our work revolved around two of their songs, our attention was firmly on providing techniques and rehearsal tactics they could use to continue their development beyond the coaching session.

Regular readers won’t be surprised to know that duetting featured prominently here, and worked its usual magic. Indeed, it was in this context that previous experience showed most clearly, by producing the most clearly articulated observations on what they had been listening to. Honing the listening skills isn’t just about the ears, it’s about working out what the ears have just perceived, and the duetting process gives a structured environment in which to develop this skill, at the same time as cleaning up the quartet’s performance.

Eclectic Quartet Coaching

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 14th March 2019

I'm using their pic because it's better than the one I tookI spent Saturday afternoon working with The Eclectic Quartet, who are preparing for their first BABS Quartet semi-final together, having qualified for Convention at Prelims back in November. They bring a good deal of flexibility and musicianship to their singing, with a readiness to drop into a song at any point, which made our work pleasantly efficient.

We gave most of our attention to developing the musical shape of their two newest songs, paying attention to both local details and building the overall arc. One of the challenges of a style that uses only four voices in a predominantly homophonic texture is that the resources for developing musical architecture and contrast are inherently more limited than, say, an orchestra, or even a piano. But within that sound world, even with its restrictions of range, timbre and texture, you can achieve a satisfying range of expression if you have a canny arranger and are alert to the signals they give you. The arrangers of both their charts can be very canny in this way, so we had plenty to work with.

Expressive Modes and Musical Shape

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Sunday 10th March 2019

When coaching a cappella groups, I’ll often point out a basic distinction build into popular a cappella styles that encodes information about how the music is communicating. When only one part is singing the words, with the others accompanying, the intent is usually narrative, telling a story. When all parts are singing the same words (and this usually implies at the same time – homorhythmic or nearly so), the intent is usually declarative, making a statement.

Of course, there are intermediate states - accompanied duet, or trio plus neutral bass-line for instance – but they slot in quite happily on this continuum between the more discursive and the more emphatic.

A Menagerie of Metaphors

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 5th March 2019

Floddy the Hippo of Belonging: sorry about the camera-shake - it must have been an emotional moment...Everyone likes a good animal metaphor. At least, anyone who’s any fun does. After running into some new ones at the BABS Directors Academy in January, I realised I was getting a nice little collection together, enough to share as a group.

Floddy, the Hippo of Belonging Anyone who has come to my house for coaching in the last decade will have met my side-kick Floddy the hippo. But his main claim to fame was as the personification of love and belonging needs in a session I did for LABBS directors on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs back in 2012.

Elephants appeared twice during that recent weekend. Alex and Boo de Bruin told of how in their time at Avon Harmony they would work on engaging the breath by asking singers to push Boris the purple elephant from in front of them out to the side. It wasn’t clear why Boris needed to be purple, but it was definitely an important attribute.

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