A Cappella

Pic courtesy of BABS facebook feedThis last weekend saw the first in-person barbershop Convention in the UK since before Covid. If the British Association of Barbershop Singers' Convention had fallen in its more usual spot in the calendar a month later, that honour would have fallen to Sweet Adelines Region 31, but that’s just how things worked out with public holidays this year.

Sing2022 was a smaller event than we have been used to in recent years. Both in terms of its duration – starting a bit later on the Friday, ending on the Sunday night rather than going into the Monday – and in terms of number of delegates. There were fewer competing choruses than usual, and many if not most of the choruses were visibly depleted in number since before the pandemic. This is a common experience amongst choirs across the country, not just barbershop, though people are starting to report a new uptick in interest as people feel more confident to go out do things again and are looking for new pastimes.

Having shared some of the background to The Vocal Freedom Project in a previous post, I thought it might be helpful to explore in a little more depth what I mean by the phrase ‘vocal freedom’ in this context. It is one of the ideas that is both multidimensional and holistic – you can think about it from a number of different angles, but in practice they all work together in a single, unified experience.

The Physical Dimension is the most obvious, in that it is the one we are most likely to directly perceive in ourselves and in others, both visually and aurally. We find physical freedom by shedding extraneous muscular tension – that is, muscular engagement that isn’t doing anything productive. Tongue, jaw, neck, shoulders, glutes are all areas we tense up when under stress then never quite loosen off again when the immediate stressor goes away. Our bodies get locked up, our breath becomes shallow, and we hear this in our voices as strain and loss of resonance. Vocal Freedom Project workshops start with the body as the dimension which is both most accessible and usually the most urgent to address.

Today tickets have gone on sale for the first of what will probably become a series of workshops called the Vocal Freedom Project. We’ve got quite detailed info about the VFP’s rationale and aims over on the project page, but I thought it might also be useful to give a little background into its genesis.

The project was born in a conversation back in early December with my friend Myra, who sang with me in Magenta for ten years. I can’t remember exactly how she phrased her expression of her need to sing, but she crystallized a lot of the observations I had been making over the months since live singing had restarted in the UK about what the lockdown experience had done to people’s voices.

Warm-up pic snapped at a particularly invigorating moment

Last Thursday evening saw me coaching Strictly A Cappella, having spent the afternoon coaching Frisson quartet. Both ensembles are preparing for a concert coming up next week – and if you think the timing of the coaching is surprisingly close to the performance, you’d be right. Our plan had been to work together the week before, but Covid had other ideas.

Still, when you are working that close to a performance you get a very distinctive kind of energy and impetus to the experience. With both groups we romped through far more music than you would when digging deep at an earlier stage of preparation, with all attention focused on how to enhance the impact of music that is already essentially well under control.

Almost two years to the day since the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers last held an in-person education event, we gathered in Coventry on Saturday for a day of director training. We had a curriculum built round various aspects of the recovery process all choruses are going through at the moment, underpinned by practical work for all delegates that focused on the relationship between listening and conductor gesture. This is the central element of the conductor’s craft, and precisely what had been ripped out of the process during the whole Zoom era.

A recurrent theme in this blog after these kinds of events is the sense of coming home with a full note-book. That cliché becomes meaningful again after such an education drought. For sure, there have been all kinds of online events to attend as either leader or delegate, and I learned things from both types of participation, but the richness and depth of learning you get with a room full of people is just in another league. I had conversations with a number of people about how we’d got to the point last year where we were just running on empty, and how nourishing it felt to finally spend time in person with other directors. The full pages of our notebooks reflect the refilling of our spirits.

I spent a happy Tuesday evening with my friends at Amersham A Cappella, working on the music they are preparing to compete with at the European Barbershop Convention in Helsingborg in May. It was probably the closest to a ‘normal’ experience I’d had this side of the pandemic. Aside from the open door for ventilation, and the need to wear a mic so those unable to be there in person could watch via livestream, it felt just like old times.

Familiar faces helped this feeling of course – we have a long-standing relationship that made it easy to slot straight back into the kind of work we do together. And the nature of the work – diving deep into musical detail - slotted us back into a familiar context of how the major contest of events of the barbershop world organise the experience of their participants over the course of months.

In my previous post about the differences in arranging for male and female voicings, I reflected on how little opportunity you get for genuinely tight voicings for ensembles working in lower registers. One of the things that brought this into focus for me recently was a conversation about a specific arrangement written in the women’s key, explaining why I didn’t feel it would work transposed down for a men’s group. The closely-voiced chords that bring spritz and joy in the higher register would become cloudy and unclear lower down.

Today’s subject has also provided a reason to decline to transpose particular arrangements down for men, though I’ve tended to remain somewhat veiled in my explanations for the decision. ‘It wouldn’t work well in the lower key’ is a kinder thing to say than, ‘I don’t think men will be able to sing that’.

So, what is it that I doubt men’s capacities to perform effectively? And why do I harbour that doubt?

There have been a number of productive conversations recently in the Barbershop Arrangers’ Facebook group about arranging for women’s voices, and why you can’t just transpose an arrangement for men up a 4th or a 5th and expect it to sound good. We can thank Amanda Nance for starting us off, and a good number of my fellow female arrangers have piled in sharing best practice.

Examples of things to consider have included: voicing the chords more tightly than you would for men, keeping the bari line below the lead more than above it, and care of tessitura, in particular not keeping tenors in the upper part of the range all the time, and ditto for the lower 3rd of the basses’ range. Just summarising these here so that when the detail of the discussions have been buried under the weight of subsequent threads, I’ve got a record of the key things shared at the time.