April 2025

Harmonic Choices and Expressive Range

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Friday 25th April 2025

One of my stock phrases when coaching expressive performance is: The lyrics tell us what is going on, the music tells us how to feel about it. Like most stock phrases it lacks nuance in some contexts, but is a safe and useful generalisation that focuses our attention on the role that of aspects of a song that can sometimes seem quite intangible play in its communicative impact.

All musical elements play a part in shaping the sense of characterisation and emotional narrative - melody, rhythm, texture, voicing – but today I am thinking particularly about harmony. For there is a particular challenge that faces the arranger when working within the defined harmonic vocabulary of contest barbershop: how do you shop a song without making it sound just like every other barbershop song you’ve ever heard?

Building Resonance with SpecsAppeal

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 15th April 2025

I’ve just spent a happy Sunday with SpecsAppeal, working with them on techniques to help them build their unit sound as a quartet. I’ve known them for some years, having arranged for them a number of times, but this is the first time I’ve actually coached them. I have enjoyed seeing how they have grown as an ensemble over time, and we all came into the day with a sense of alignment between what they are currently focused on and what I felt I could help them with.

Sometimes a coaching session is all about exploring a particular repertoire, and you might have thought that this might have been the case on Sunday as I had arranged both of the songs we worked on for them. But in fact, there was relatively little they needed from me in terms of concept or shape; they had picked the songs and knew exactly what they wanted to do with them, so other than helping them execute those intentions more effectively in a couple of places, there was very little we did that wouldn’t apply to any song they might have chosen to sing.

Mistake-Busting Method for Quartets

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Friday 11th April 2025

I mentioned in my recent post about a coaching session developing a rehearsal protocol for quartets to support each other in correcting notes that had been learned incorrectly. It felt like it deserved a post in its own right, as it’s something lots of us need to deal with and so it would be useful to work through not just what to do, but why this procedure helps. Plus of course having its own post will make it easier to point back to when I meet other people with the same need!

So, learning any phrase involves generating neural pathways that encode the act of singing it; the more you repeat that act, the stronger the neural pathway becomes and thus the more automated. This is very useful, until it turns out that you have been practising a wrong note, when the strength of your practised neural pathway keeps pulling you back when you’re trying to correct it.

Saturday Singing with Cantare Lunedì

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Monday 7th April 2025

If you are familiar with Italian at all, you will not be surprised to learn that the quartet I spent Saturday afternoon with usually sings on Mondays. It was a session focused on techniques and methods rather than preparing for a specific performance occasion: the repertoire was chosen as useful vehicles to work on, but the intent was to work on things that could then be transferred to all their other songs.

There were two broad areas we focused on: first, vocal technique, second, ensemble techniques. They arrived as four singers comfortably in control of their vocal apparatus (I note that the tonal centre did not waver all afternoon), but with potential to develop greater resonance.

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