A Cappella

I didn't take a screenshot because I didn't want to show their costumes before their big reveal at Convention: pic from their website insteadThere are many things that you can’t achieve on Zoom, but there are also some key things that you can, such as coaching people in a different country for a couple of hours. Much as I love the city of Dordrecht from my visit there a few years ago, it’s not really a viable trip to make just for an evening!

I spent Thursday evening working with Route Sixteen, who will soon be defending their gold medal from 2019 in Holland Harmony’s national barbershop convention. They are finally getting the chance to share the concept package they had originally planned for 2021, and, whilst it has been quite hard to pace how to keep it alive through the covid era, it will be wonderful for them finally to share it.

After my first recent post on voicings for mixed barbershop choruses, I received a message from a singer who sings in both male-voice and mixed-voice choruses asking about practical advice for developing his upper range. So that guarantees that I have at least one interested reader for this particular blog post.

As is so often the way, a couple of headline points will be useful to start with before heading into the nitty-gritty. As I mentioned in my post on advice for older voices, range works very much on a use-it-or-lose it basis, so if you don’t regularly visit the outer edges of where you can currently sing, those edges will move closer together. You might not (probably won’t) need the extremes in much actual repertoire, but by keeping in touch with them you give yourself headroom for the rangier passages in your music.

Natalie Feddon addressing the chorus

It was all happening at Cleeve Harmony’s chorus night on Wednesday. They had a visit from LABBS Chair Natalie Feddon and a new member to be welcomed into the organisation, as well as two new songs to be coached on. I was there for the latter bit, but it was fun to be there for the other bits, especially as I’d not been able to join them for their 10th birthday celebrations the week before.

The two new songs we were working on were ones I’d arranged for them back in the autumn, so one was at the ‘basically learned but still finding our way round it’ stage and the other at the ‘started learning, but only the music team has sung it together yet’ stage. One of the fun things about coaching music in this very early stage of development is that you can explore global themes such as concept and groove that shape how people feel and understand the music while they’re still getting acquainted with it.

In my previous post, we considered why mixed barbershop presents vocal challenges that are quite distinct from the single-sex forms of the genre. (In a nutshell, the standard distribution of vocal ranges for a single-sex group is a camel, but for mixed groups is a dromedary.)

We also considered some of the impacts of this structural feature. It affects individuals singers, as quite a few in any mixed chorus are likely to end up singing out of their best range. It also affects the group as a whole, through the impact of people singing outside their best range on the sound, and/or through difficulty populating the parts in an optimum balance. That post didn’t mention the expressive impact of singing out of range, but it’s something I’ve touched upon before more than once.

I am returning to this theme as a lot of people are grappling with the challenges of making a genre developed for and within single-sex ensembles work with mixed groups. Having interacted with a number of different ensembles in various capacities in recent times, I wanted to collate what I’ve learned from them about the difficulties they’ve faced and the solutions they have found.

First, though, it is worth thinking through why mixed barbershop can prove tricky, before looking at the consequences for lived experience, and what we can do about it. This may turn into more than one post; it has the feel of a question that expands as you think about it!

Some days you find similar concepts coming up repeatedly in different musical contexts; Saturday was such a day with my friends at Bristol A Cappella. One of the advantages of days like this is that you find people get quicker at applying the concepts on successive encounters, and indeed that after a while you no longer have to point out where they need to apply them, as they’re figuring it out for themselves.

One theme for the day was of staying with a note right to the end of the phrase. Linguistically, the brain pretty much moves on when you get to the last syllable of a sentence; in general conversation we don’t tend to elongate them, but go straight to drawing breath for the next utterance. But when singing, it is very audible when the attention has moved on, even if people are holding the note for the notated length. You have to stay interested in it for the tone to retain integrity.

Jay's selfie captures to joy in the room

The weekend saw the first in-person BABS Directors Academy since 2020 (and my first since 2019, as I missed the last one). We had Dr Jay Dougherty as our guest educator, who brings with him a deep and abiding understanding of the barbershop style along with higher degrees and HE teaching experience in choral conducting. He is probably most known in the barbershop world for having taken over Joe Liles’s ‘Tune it or Die’ course at Harmony University, which he has made his own by drawing on research undertaken in his doctoral studies. He led front and centre with this material, dedicating three consecutive sessions on Saturday to it.

There are those who attempt to make music theory into a fully-rational and systematic endeavour, but those of use working at the sharp end of music-making* know that it is messier than that. Yes, you can organise a lot of it into logical patterns that help you generalise and draw inferences, but a lot of music theory is about finding ways to identify and make sense of stuff that happens in real life.

So, from the Concrete-Experiential school of music theory that brought you the Icicle 7th (Karri Quan), the Phnert (Lori Lyford) and Swooshythroughiness (me), I bring you the concept of Canute passages.