September 2009

Last Sunday, the best of British barbershop conspired to present a show at the London Palladium as the climax to the national ‘barbershop awareness week’. I had a couple of personal highpoints, with NoteOrious and Eu4ia both singing my arrangements – the latter having commissioned theirs specifically for this show (Christine Aguilera's 'Candyman').

It was a long show – a good three hours – but it did a very good job of sustaining interest. Given that all the acts were from basically the same kind of a cappella world, this is a testament to some very effective programming – it could have become very samey, but didn’t. I’ve been finding it useful to analyse what went in to making the structure so effective.

This article was first published earlier this year in Voicebox, the magazine for LABBS members. I'm reproducing it here in the wake of a conversation with a friend from Holland who was developing a similar checklist for a workshop she'll be running. It was originally written for a barbershop audience, but generalises quite well to other genres if you subsititute their classic musical features for the style-specific ones mentioned here.

When people choose music to sing in contest, they think a lot about its suitability in terms of style – is it barbershop, in the terms defined by the contest and judging system we have adopted from the Barbershop Harmony Society.

But there is an equally important dimension to suitability, and this one applies to all the music we sing, not just for contest: suitability to performer. However great a song and arrangement is in itself, it will only produce a thrilling performance if it is a good fit for your quartet or chorus.

So, how do you decide if a song/arrangement is suitable for you?

The second central Inner Game principle is Will. This is about the performer’s capacity to choose how they do something, to take control. But again, crucially, it’s not about getting it right and all the judgements that implies. Rather, it assumes that the ability to do something in one way rather than another is a more fundamental skill that is not only logically separable from, but actually precedes the decision about how it should be done.

Tone Bianca DahlOne of the sessions at the ABCD Convention at the end of August was workshop on communication between choir, conductor and audience led by Tone Bianca Dahl. Tone teaches choral conducting at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and her book on this subject has recently been translated into English. Her central question in the presentation was: what creates the magic?; and can we create it at will?

On Wednesday evening I had another visit to coach my friends at Harmony InSpires, near Oxford. I last heard them back in November 2008, when they had recently acquired a lot of new members, and it was good to see that lots of those new members were still there, and more new ones arriving on a regular basis. Whether you have a net inflow or outflow of singers is always a good indication as to the health of a chorus!

We spent much of the evening thinking about the breath, and the way it is the key to delivering musical flow.