A Cappella

As anyone who has been involved in sourcing arrangements for vocal ensembles over a period of years knows, the introduction of Sheet Music Plus’s ArrangeMe programme has been a game-changer. A huge proportion of in-copyright popular songs can now be arranged and published without all the time-consuming and expensive sourcing of bespoke licenses for each ensemble who wants to sing it.

Just remembered to catch a screen-shot before we got into the detail

I spent a happy couple of hours on Monday evening coaching SWITCH quartet from the Netherlands. I realised as I came to write this post that one of the things about online coaching is that you don’t necessarily know exactly where the people you are working with are based, but as I had met one of them previously in Dordrecht, that is where I imagined them!

We were working on an arrangement I did about 7 years ago, and it was interesting to revisit it with them. I remembered a good deal about how and why I had made the bigger-picture decisions, and also found the individual lines quite easy to sight-read (which may be due to familiarity, or because I like to write lines I find sight-readable!), but there was also a sense of both discovery and re-discovery on working through it with them.

Amersham 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.

I spent Saturday in Milton Keynes where I had been asked to deliver a workshop on Vocal Health and Developing Resonance with Junction 14 Ladies A Cappella. I have worked with the group every so often over quite a few years, but always previously in the more standard coaching format. It made an interesting change to approach the day through a single theme. It was overall probably physically less tiring than a coaching day – there were many more opportunities to sit down – but also more cognitively tiring as we were dealing with information as well as skills.

The day was structured around exploring the fundamental elements of vocal craft, introduced in the order in which one needs to get them established in order to set up the instrument: body, breath, phonation and range in the morning, moving onto the resonant cavities in the afternoon. Each involved some sharing of concepts, some exploring in exercises, and some application to repertoire.

I have been thinking about perfect pitch for a couple of weeks since an interesting conversation about it with a barbershop friend. It’s one of those things that is often – well, usually – taken as an indicator of high musical skill, with connotations of special talent not vouchsafed to ordinary folk. Its very name suggests that it is not merely a Good Thing to have, but The Best. I think some of these assumptions bear a bit of interrogation.

First off, let’s think about what perfect pitch is: essentially an unusually reliable and accurate memory for pitch. It is a rare capacity when it manifests with the level of consistency that allows someone to identify and/or produce notes immediately and intuitively and be confident that they are right. But it is this consistency rather than the fact of pitch memory itself that is unusual.

When I last reflected on the category of ‘old barbershop’ eight years ago, I finished up by wondering what sounded normal then that would sound dated 20 years on. Well, it’s only eight years on, and I found myself thinking about perceptible cultural shifts again at the BABS Convention back in May.

My musings last time were mostly about musical things like approaches to voice-leading and embellishment and performance things like styles of body language in the context of continuous performance traditions. I did mention subject matter in passing, but only mentioned the most ostentatiously outmoded lyrics in defining the category of ‘old’.

Now, by contrast, I found myself observing a clear division in song storyline and lyric between those that evoked social relations that we would wish to promote these days in an organisation that celebrates diversity, equity and inclusion, and those in which the social relations feel uncomfortably old-school.

Anniversary quartet champions Fifth Element on their victory lap

The Spring bank holiday weekend saw the British Association of Barbershop Singers hold their annual Convention in Harrogate, at which they celebrated the organisation’s 50th anniversary. It was a full schedule, with long contests as well as shows and various other activities, and it would have been pretty much impossible to partake of everything on offer as well as catch-up with friends.

To mark the occasion, all quartets who wanted to compete had been invited to do so at the convention itself (rather than going through a preliminary round some months earlier to select the top tranche to compete on the big stage); this meant that Friday was completely filled with the quartet semi-finals. Fortunately, the first ever livestream broadcast of a BABS convention meant that those who were still travelling up during the day were able to keep tabs on what was happening en route. (I hope it was only the car passengers watching while actually on the move, but as everyone turned up alive, I assume this was the case!)

I spent a happy Saturday workshopping and coaching with the Sussex Harmonisers at the weekend. They have an interesting set-up: one club, with one board and music team, but two choruses, one male-voice, the other female-voice, which also currently share a director (though they haven’t always done so). The two choruses operate largely independently as ensembles, with separate rehearsal nights, but the shared infrastructure allows them to coordinate and collaborate on repertoire and performance plans.

Saturday was their first shared education event, and they devised a very effective model for it. In the morning, I worked with both choruses together in a workshop themed ‘The Listening Chorus’. Then after lunch, they took it in turns to have 45-minute sessions of coaching on songs from their respective repertoires, with the other chorus listening.