Exploring Characterisation with Bristol A Cappella

Saturday took me back to work with my friends in Bristol A Cappella on the set they are preparing for both the European Barbershop Convention in early May, and the BABS national Convention at the end of the month. As I mentioned after my last visit, whilst we have been working together for many years now, this is the first time I have arranged for them, and it brings a whole new level of intimacy to the relationship. One of the singers remarked to me about how much they wanted to do me proud, to which I replied that that was how I felt about them.

One of the things about an experienced ensemble is that a lot of the technical nuts-and-bolts of how to use the voice and how to operate as a musical unit are already in place, which allows the focus to shift primarily to issues of artistry and communication. Oh, we had the odd vowel to refine and chord to balance, but these were details to be swept up on the way past as we turned our attention to bringing out what makes these songs distinctive.

In the morning we thought about vocal characterisation via the thought experiment of making the sound such that if someone couldn’t see the performance, they could still imagine accurately what it looked like. This was particularly salient for the first song of the set, as it is a medley that presents two quite distinct (but narratively interrelated) personas, each articulated by its own harmonic world.

(I realise this is annoyingly abstract, and I’m sorry I can’t share with you more of the detail of the imagery we were using, because we had a lot of fun with it, but I don’t want to spoil the big reveals in Helsingborg and Bournemouth. You should get to the performances if you can, though, as you’ll have a lot of fun too.)

It’s interesting to think about the various layers through which characterisation is built up here. The fundamental level is the work of the composers and lyricists, who create a persona through the combination of verbal/poetic content and melodic/harmonic content. The original songs also do this through timbre/instrumentation, but in an a cappella context that dimension is obviously much more constrained.

There are some things the arrangement can do, though, to develop the persona in the absence of timbral variety: choices of voicing and texture are significantly circumscribed by the needs of barbershop contest, but there is still room to make salient choices. Harmonic language likewise needs to be shaped by the style rules, as both songs were in the category of close enough to the barbershop harmonic vocabulary that the few extra barbershop chords needed could fit in coherently.

One could have added more, indeed, but I wanted to keep the harmonic – and hence expressive – worlds of the two songs in the medley distinct. One song rings with a lot of major triads but is a bit light on 7ths, the other is chock full of the colours of 7ths and 9ths but a bit light on triadic pillars. Either would be a bit marginal as a stand-alone contest piece, but they complement each other stylistically, and the contrast between them serves to build a dramatic structure for the overall emotional journey.

Our work in bringing this to life was thus to find vocal colours that responded to these harmonic flavours and created a sonic surface that articulated these different expressive worlds. This is what the originals did with instrumentation; we did it by thinking about vowel choices, larynx position, and shaping the vocal tract. Oh, and with lots of metaphors: the technical discussions were useful to help people figure out what to do with their voices, but for using this to tell the story, imagery is much more useful.

In the afternoon, we cross-referenced our vocal/musical work with their choreographic plans. The challenge here was to find the body language to deliver the sonic world we had created before lunch while doing lots of other things with their limbs. We looked at this from both ends to create the connection between voice and body.

First, we approached it through character and story: finding a way of holding the self that made sense of the people being portrayed while maintaining integrity of vocal production through all the various, sometime complex, moves. (Again, the specifics would be useful to explain this, but you’re not going to get them, sorry.) We also approached it from the other end: we know how we want this to sound, so how can we inhabit our bodies so as to deliver that sound?

The nice thing about this work is that, while I was not particularly focused as a coach on the visual impact, we achieved a much greater sense of visual coherence within the tableau through the process of exploring the uses of the self required to create the aural impact. It’s also useful for the performers to be able to integrate these elements: we only have the one brain each, so if you can use the same metaphor to guide both your vocal apparatus and your dancing limbs you have a much better chance of doing both at the same time.

The biggest overall take-away of the day for me was: how important song choice remains. Preparing an ambitious performance package for contest takes a lot of rehearsal time, and colours people’s experience of their chorus life for months. When the whole chorus is really invested in the content, the creative energy they bring to the process lifts and sustains each other through the extended arc of development and keeps the voices sounding vibrant throughout.