LABBS Harmony College 2026: Initial Thoughts

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 30th April 2026
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What is the collective noun for Harmony College Faculty?What is the collective noun for Harmony College Faculty?

The weekend saw about 300 members of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers gather together in Nottingham to nourish each other by learning together, making music, and fostering friendships old and new. You can tell by the terms of that headline description that it was a richly satisfying experience in many ways: if you were to analyse it in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs you’d be ticking boxes all the way up from Safety to Self Actualisation.

As a result I have piles of notes to sort through and it may take me some time to digest and organise all the ideas the event generated, so for today I’m just going to reflect on some of the things that helped the event leave us with such a glow.

Three Blind Mice and the Rest is Guff

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 21st April 2026
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FRapr26

I sometimes dither over titles, so when someone says, ‘You should make that the title for your blog post about tonight,’ I am more than happy to take the suggestion. It will take some explanation to establish why this was one of the key ideas to emerge from my recent coaching session with Fascinating Rhythm, but we will get there in due course.

Long-time readers will know that I have had a long and happy relationship with this chorus, who went through a phase of commissioning new contest material from me every year, and then inviting me to coach them on it. This pattern was disrupted first by covid and the subsequent rebuild, and more recently by a director change. Their new MD, Wendy Howse, is settled in now though and they are rediscovering their delight in bringing never-previously-heard arrangements to sing to their peers at Convention.

Releasing the Badgers' Intuitive Musicianship

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 31st March 2026
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What is the collective noun for badgers?What is the collective noun for badgers?

I spent Saturday with Sporty Badger, Posh Badger, Scary Badger and Baby Badger, collectively known as Release the Badgers, working with them on their set for the upcoming LABBS Quartet Prelims contest. As you can imagine from their nomenclature choices, nothing silly happened at all. (Did you know that you can make any adjective more entertaining by inserting it before the word ‘badger’. You’re welcome.)

While their two songs contest songs are contrasted in mood and style, we found some common themes between them on areas that would benefit from TLC. This is useful for embedding skills: it means both that you get a good cost-per-wear on you work, since you can keep applying it in different musical contexts, and that these multiple opportunities for application give commensurately numerous opportunities for practice.

World Mixed Barbershop in Wuppertal

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 19th March 2026
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Wuppertal's glorious Historische Stadthalle: displaying flags from all 9 countries representedWuppertal's glorious Historische Stadthalle: displaying flags from all 9 countries represented

Last weekend saw mixed barbershop quartets and choruses from nine different countries converge to compete at the world mixed championships, hosted by Barbershop in Germany alongside their own national championships. The last time I made to BinG!’s Barbershopmusikfestival was in 2018 (we were booked also to go in 2020, but we all know how that turned out…). This was the occasion of the inaugural World Mixed chorus contest, and it is interesting to see how – and how much – things have changed in the interim.

The World Mixed quartet contest has been established for longer so the changes here are less dramatic, though it shares what was for me the headline development: mixed barbershop appears at last to have a handle on choice of key. For the first few years after the introduction of mixed ensembles at barbershop conventions I was consistently commenting on the challenges of finding a key that works for all voices in the group.

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