Music Theory’s White Racial Frame: Thoughts on Knowledge and Power

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Saturday 17th October 2020
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It is of course a cliché that knowledge is power. I have always thought about this in terms of why education is valuable. Knowing about stuff enables you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to; having more information allows you to make decisions that will fit the real world better and thus achieve your ends more effectively.

Philip Ewell’s blog posts on race and music theory, however, have shown me new ways to think about this truism. The generalised understanding still works, but Ewell also draws attention to ways in which the construction of knowledge within a discipline is a means to accumulate, wield, and confer power within the institutions that curate and validate knowledge.

I explored one aspect of this a few years back when reflecting on why it is so difficult to get women and composers of colour into the canon of western art music. I noted how our confidence as well-educated musicians is constructed through familiarity with its canons, and thus how it feels when we are asked to do engage with something unfamiliar: profoundly disempowering.

Reflecting on the Craft: an Evening with Chorus Iceni

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Sunday 11th October 2020
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I forgot to take a screenshot, so borrowed a nice pic from their websiteI forgot to take a screenshot, so borrowed a nice pic from their website

On Monday evening I had the pleasure of visiting Chorus Iceni as part of the series of masterclasses they are running over this autumn. It is always a delight to be invited to share my craft (you can tell from my blog title I get my kicks from increasing the world’s capacity to harmonise), but it was a particular joy to visit this chorus, as this was the group, under their previous name of Colne Harmony, in which I had started my barbershop journey back in 1996.

There were still three faces from the club back then, including Sally who was membership secretary at the time, and Maxine with whom I sang in my first quartet. I’d normally be looking forward to seeing them at LABBS Convention at the end of October, but as this has – like so much else this year – had to become a virtual event instead, it was lovely to get the chance to say hello in person, if not to hang out and gossip at such leisure.

Reflections on Texture, Persona, and Sharing the Candy

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 6th October 2020
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When I joined the Telfordaires, the chorus repertoire included an arrangement of a popular ballad in which the leads had the melody, and, apart from a couple of short passages where the tenors duetted with them, everyone else sang ‘doo’ throughout. Members of the harmony parts had mixed feelings about the song. On the one hand, they recognised that it was very beautiful in performance and went down well with audiences (the Telfordaires really get their kicks from pleasing audiences), but on the other, having no lyrics to sing left them feeling a bit left out of the story.

I have been alert to the need to share the narrative and musical candy around ever since Sandra Lea-Riley commissioned me to arrange Moondance for Heartbeat with the memorable specification that they wanted a bassline that wasn’t just ‘all those damn dms’. So when I started to think about how I was going to approach another popular ballad I’ve recently been asked to arrange for a quartet, I went in with the thought that whilst the voice+guitar texture of the original lent itself beautifully to a melody+doo arrangement, I would find ways to move beyond this as the arrangement went on to keep all singers involved.

Researching the Background to Your Music

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 1st October 2020
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Regular readers may remember how earlier this year Elizabeth Davies raised the ante for the project of relegating racist repertoire from the barbershop stage to the history books in her articulation of the Power of Boo. This prompted me into becoming more proactive into trying to ensure I never need to enact this power.

So, I’ve had an article about the problems with these old songs come out in both Harmony Express and VoiceBox over the summer, and on Monday night I taught a session on Researching the Background to Your Music for the LABBS eOnline programme as a follow-up to that article. I figured that if I’d drawn attention to a problem, it would be helpful to offer ways for people to solve it.

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