Spring Bank Holiday Weekend, New Version

Friday night at Birmingham Pride

Well over half the Spring bank holiday weekends in my entire life have been spent at the British Association of Barbershop Singers Annual Convention. This year was the first of a new shape to the weekend, as it is also the weekend of Birmingham Pride which is a major fixture in Rainbow Voices’ calendar. Hence I spent the Friday night with them performing on the big stage at Pride, before heading down to Bournemouth to catch just the final day of the Convention.

I had planned to travel after participating with the choir in the parade on Saturday, but it became clear that that would be attempting too much in the context of some health stuff I’ve been dealing with this year. Looking forward to rectifying that omission next year. Even without it, I was pretty wiped out after the journey and didn’t actually get to see many performances on the day I was there, choosing instead to prioritise connecting with people and taking naps. You can’t get hugs on YouTube.

(Don’t worry about the health stuff, by the way. If left untreated it would have caused me trouble, but it wasn’t, so it won’t. But I do need to recuperate from the treatment itself. Getting there, it's a good exercise in patience which isn’t always my strongest suit. Also why you've not seen much blogging from me this year.)

Anyway, as a result I have relatively few useful observations to make about the overall state of the national barbershop scene – performance standards, repertoire choices, trends in presentation or delivery – as I don’t have much data to generalise from. The new shape of the weekend did however get me thinking quite a lot about the particular experience of singing for your own people.

Most audiences choirs that connect with are made up of a mixture of friends and family who have come to hear them because of the personal connection with the performance and members of the public who are there for the event that the choir’s performance forms part of. The proportions vary considerably depending on the type of engagement: performances organised and promoted by the choir themselves primarily attract the first kind, occasions where the choir is invited to perform by someone else will see the second predominate.

But there’s a third kind of audience, made up of people who share some kind of identity connection with the choir, without necessarily knowing its members personally (although quite a few may well come to over repeated events). Both the Pride audience and the barbershop convention audience had this characteristic, if in different ways.

It creates a particular bond of trust between performers and audience when each knows the other has walked in their shoes in at least one dimension of their lives. The singers know the audience will understand what they aim to offer, the listeners know that they can trust the intentions of the performers. There is a sense of occasion that heightens the experience for both, and often lifts the singers to perform up to their best. It is these audiences that really focus me in on Mo Field’s advice that, ‘Your only job is to make somebody in that audience feel less lonely.’

And then, the thought occurs to me that in every apparently type 2 audience – random people who are there through chance or a different aspect of the event, with no particular connection with the choir – there are people who are potentially or actually also members of the community or communities the choir belongs to. People who would like to sing but didn’t know where to start, people who are discovering an LGBT+ identity but haven’t fully worked out who it is safe to share it with. People who need the message and/or direct fellowship the choir can offer.

So, ideally we need to perform to every audience as we do to our own people, with that sense of trust and connection and affirmation. Because the people in a general audience who have yet to connect with the communities they need are the ones that need us most of all. We learn a lot about creating love and belonging through music at events like the ones I was blessed to participate in this weekend, and we need to take that love and share it with all the other audiences who don’t yet know how wonderful it is.