LABBS Convention 2024

‹-- PreviousNext --›

Amersham A Cappella and SpecsAppeal: the afterglows were also excellentAmersham A Cappella and SpecsAppeal: the afterglows were also excellent

The last weekend in October typically takes me to the annual convention of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers. This year we were back in Bournemouth, which once again seemed to hang on to the tail end of summer for us.

Looking back on my reflections from last year, I see I was full of thoughts about how hearing fresh music keeps your listeners fresh throughout a long contest day – and also about some strategies to help make that happen. I was having similar thoughts this year, particularly in the quartet contests. Of course now we have the mixed quartet contest alongside the upper voices one, both semifinal and final rounds are significantly longer than they used to be, giving more opportunity for repeated songs to show up.

It occurs to me to wonder how much the Extreme Quartetting/Harmony Brigade culture is feeding into this. It has certainly done a lot to produce a quartet scene in which the general level of skills is much more secure than it used to be. Back in the day, if you were the only quartet in your locality, there wasn’t necessarily anyone from whom you could learn the various ensemble techniques that help glue the quartet sound together. You’d hear a lot of quartets made up of people who were musical and had nice voices but didn’t know how to get the sound to lock (quick wave back to myself of 1997-98).

Now, you have a whole network of people who meet a couple of times a year for intensive quartet experiences, in which they all learn from each other as they hone their skills, and this has audibly nourished their ongoing quartetting in between times. But it does make me wonder whether this has also created a shared repertoire of tried-and-tested arrangements that people are drawing on for their contest material (whether via the official event rep, or just from the dynamics of the friendship group), particularly when putting together a long-distance quartet that may only be able to rehearse intermittently. You can see why people would like to work with tunes they trust, but if a lot of people from the same social world do so, it possibly serves them less well in helping them stand out from the crowd.

The chorus contest seemed to have a greater variety of music on offer. In part I am sure this is because choruses have more resources to commission than quartets do, although the variety was also showing up in choices of arrangements that weren’t premieres, but nonetheless also hadn’t been performed much at convention over recent years.

This in turn made me realise that the problem isn’t necessarily hearing the same song three times in one weekend; it’s hearing it three times in one weekend when you’ve heard it a bunch of times already in the previous few years. I had a flashback to my first barbershop convention ever (also in Bournemouth: BABS 1996), in which I’m sure I heard Steve Jamison’s arrangement of Georgia on My Mind at least three times, but I didn’t find it boring because I’d never heard it – or indeed all the genre-specific gestures it makes - before.

And on the subject of music that wasn’t premiered, but I’d only heard once before some years ago, I had an experience this weekend that I’d also had back at BABS Convention in May, of hearing what turned out to be one of my own arrangements performed and spending quite a bit of the performance thinking: is this mine? In both cases it was a song that I knew I had arranged, but one for which other arrangements are available, so the confusion was over whether I was remembering having made those specific arrangement choices, or whether it’s just that they’re the sensible thing to do with the song that anyone would have done.

In both cases, there came a point partway through where I correctly anticipated something that was sufficiently idiosyncratic that I couldn’t have guessed it without prior knowledge, and that resolved the question. I’m still wondering, though, whether it was narcissistic to think, ‘ooh I like this intro’, only to realise a minute or two later that it was me who wrote it.

I suspect this is an issue that is only going to intensify with the passage of time, as my back catalogue continues to grow and my neural plasticity continues to decline with age. I guess I have now a new arrangement goal of writing things that I will find pleasantly surprising when my marbles have long since departed.

...found this helpful?

I provide this content free of charge, because I like to be helpful. If you have found it useful, you may wish to make a donation to the causes I support to say thank you.


Archive by date

Syndicate content