Cryptic Coaching with Bristol A Cappella

I spent Saturday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella, working with them on a new contest package that they’ll be taking first to the European Barbershop Convention in Sweden next May, then a couple of weeks later to the British Association of Barbershop Singers Convention in Bournemouth.

I was not actually being cryptic (as per today’s title) with them; they know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. But we did have a laugh or two about how I was going to blog about their new package without giving any spoilers as to what it is. If I tell you that the coaching conversations included phrases such as ‘it’s an epiphany’, ‘the semiotics of testosterone’, and ‘make your ‘P’s more ‘Poo-ey’, I don’t think you’ll guess what the songs are, but you might get the idea that they’re not going to be boring.

I have been working with BAC for getting on for a decade now, but this is actually the first time I have arranged for them. It is always a pleasure to arrange for a group where I know the voices and the personalities, as it makes judgements about what will work for them – both expressively and vocally – more secure. It is also always a pleasure to hear an arrangement sung for the first time, but again when you know the people it really does feel like the voices in your head have come alive and are singing back to you.

So, what else can I tell you about our adventures without giving the game away? We talked quite a lot about the deployment of trademark barbershop thumbprints – certain types of embellishment, chord choices or voicings – and how they can be placed strategically for the emotional narrative of a song. A II7 inserted in one place is a weird bit of shoe-horning; placed in another it serves to add emotional charge to a specific lyric in the context of a barbershop audience’s listening experience.

We also found a theme emerging about the relationship between lyric and rhythmic structure. Quite often, the most important word in a sentence – the once to which you would give verbal emphasis in conversation, and with which you would gesture – lies somewhere in the middle or towards the end of the phrase. Rhythmic emphasis in music, meanwhile, often falls by default on the first beat of the bar, at least in the accompanimental structures that provide the framework in which melody unfolds.

In the context of a genre in which all parts carry the lyrics most of the time, these two imperatives sometimes fight against each other, with strong downbeats emerging from a sense of musical structure impeding natural flow and meaning of the verbal content of the lyrics. Smoothing away these accents allowed the natural accents for meaning to emerge and make more expressive sense of the narrative. The metrical structure, meanwhile, still came through clearly within the harmonic changes.

This theme also carried through into our work on their Heritage Medley. They put this together to sing as outgoing Mixed Chorus Champions at BABS Convention this year, and it was one of my highlights of the weekend. It is basically a huge medley of songs that chorus members nominated as being important to them personally in their journey as singers and people. It covers an immense stylistic range, and showcases not only the chorus’s vocal and musical skills, but also their ethos. It signals that they are interested in each other, and willing to make the effort to enter into each other’s worlds. They are planning to give it another outing at their Christmas concert this year.

Our main task with this piece was to get them all to chill out. It is a monster of a thing to learn and to sing, but now they know it, it is actually much easier to sing if they relax and trust the music to come through. Making this mindset change - sing it as if any idiot could do this – sorted a lot of the detail we might otherwise have had to work through, particularly those details to do with balance and vocal poise. A few areas still wanted specific TLC (to do with lyric and rhythm, for instance), but it became a manageable job of refinement instead of trying to do everything.

It’s wonderful to see how far the choir has come since I first knew them. They were always up for it and musical, but they have a depth of skill now that allows them to perform with a new level of confidence. Do go along to their concert if you’re in the area!