A Cappella

Warm-up pic: with coats, as the room is well-ventilated and it's January!

Tuesday evening took me to Welwyn Garden City for the first of a series of sessions with Welwyn Harmony working with the chorus and their directing team together. There are all kinds of reasons why this kind of combined approach is useful, beyond the fact that both areas of focus are of value in themselves.

As a learning experience, a double focus gives both director and singers space to digest things, to work with a new idea or technique for a while without direct scrutiny. You actually get more total learning in this way: people are going to need some time to absorb and integrate the input anyway, so you can spend some of that processing time offering input to someone else, who will then have space to do their own processing when you switch focus back.

And seeing other people learn things is itself a powerful learning experience. It’s why putting two quartets in with one coach is a successful model, and why I like to do individual voice coaching with my chorus with two singers at a time. What you learn from doing can be different from what you learn by seeing and hearing others do.

Having spent a post earlier this month being opinionated about how to render arpeggiated textures in a cappella arranging, I thought it might be useful to offer some practical tips on my preferred solution, the bell chord. After all, while it gets round pretty much all the difficulties presented in singing arpeggios, it does have its own challenges.

These challenges chiefly involve how to coordinate the parts. A keyboard player or guitarist will find it easy to play each sound source in quick succession because the means to play them (i.e. their fingers) are all operated by the same brain. A vocal ensemble is blessed with a separate brain for every sound source, which is a great boon in many situations, but makes life harder for moments like bellchords.

Yes, I know that the broken chord is a rather niche subject for an opinion-piece to start the year, but just because a subject is a tad obscure doesn’t mean you can be vehement about it. So, here goes.

You will have noticed that a lot of pieces of music involve as part of their texture the sounding of chords a note at a time rather than all together, typically as accompaniment to a melody, though sometimes as primary thematic material. It offers a sense of flow, and a more transparent, less assertive effect than sounding all the notes at once.

My previous post about the experience of sorting through a packet of music from a barbershop chorus of the 1980s got a bit long, so I decided to save the rest of my observations for a second post.

The third main impression was that, as well as the pervasiveness of nostalgia in the songs’ subject matter, it was striking how nearly everything fit very safely into the core barbershop style. Primarily homophonic, melody in the second voice down, harmonic progressions, chord choices and voicings all very orthodox. It would pretty much all pass muster as ‘contest-suitable’ these days in terms the arrangement choices – though of course a lot of it probably wouldn’t have worked so well back in the 1980s when the scoring of contest arrangements still took a weirdly tick-box approach.

A representative sample from a large collection...Back when I had first secured the contract to write my book on barbershop, the then Principal of Birmingham Conservatoire asked me in conversation, ‘So, what’s new in barbershop world?’ The question made me laugh, because the culture I was documenting was resolutely focused on celebrating the past, and really didn’t have very much interest in the new at all.

Of course, by that point – the early years of this millemium – the culture was already changing, but it was far from clear that how much of a shift would eventually take place. To be fair, we still don’t know that, but I had an experience recently that brought home how far barbershop has actually shifted since I first encountered it 25 years ago.

Having thought I’d corralled my main responses to our first weekend of live barbershop contest in two years in my previous two posts, I find a collection of miscellaneous thoughts popping intermittently into my head. (And where else would you expect thoughts, miscellaneous or otherwise, to pop, you ask.)

• Key choice for Mixed Quartets. Back in 2012, my reflections on the UK’s first mixed quartet contest included observations about how the genre requires people to be flexible and creative in how they adapt to different voice parts and the ranges they might lie in when turning a genre that developed in and for voices working within largely the same range into one that encompasses a much wider set of vocal ranges.

  I find myself somewhat surprised, nine years on, how relatively few quartets really seem to have nailed how to pitch their songs so that the parts lie in the parts of their respective singers’ voices where they sound the best. You particularly notice it with the lead part – as curator of the melody, the heart of the song, you really want the tune to sit where the expressive ranges in their voice map coherently onto the expressive shape of the song. Quartets that didn’t compromise on this gave themselves such a head start in terms of communicative impact.

Kiera Smith's photo captures a focal moment of a barbershop contest

Having discussed in my last post the experience of going to a largely normal barbershop contest in the Covid era, it is time actually to talk about the musical experience – which is, as I understand it, the point of going to these things!

My headline impression from the weekend’s listening was that, vocally, the British barbershop community is sounding in pretty good shape all things considered. Of course, this impression is strongly shaped by the classic logical error of survivorship bias - by definition only those people who feel their voices are reasonable shape are likely to put themselves forward to perform on the contest stage. Indeed, a couple of competitors withdrew after the programmes were printed; we don’t know how many others self-selected out at earlier stages.

Guest quartet Midtown

The weekend saw the UK’s first live national barbershop contest since the start of Covid, with and event that included the British Association of Barbershop Singers’ Preliminary quartet contest to qualify their 2022 Convention, the Barbershop in Harmony Mixed Quartet Contest, and an evening show. This wasn’t the first live barbershop event event – LABBS held a number of regional gatherings the previous weekend as a halfway-house back to a national Convention – but it was the nearest to normality we’d seen this side of the pandemic.

I’ll have various musical reflections to make in due course – I went along as much as anything to get a snapshot ‘state of the nation’ impression of how everyone is getting on these days – but for today the main things I’m thinking about involve the experience of doing something normal again after all we’ve been through.