A Cappella

Friday night saw a visit from Obsession! quartet from Bristol for a coaching session on developing their unit sound. The have the interesting challenge of combining two English-speaking singers with two whose first language is Spanish. This on the face of it presents all kinds of technical obstacles (vowel-matching, and the like) and psychological obstacles (anxiety about ‘getting it right’ in your second language).

We had a productive evening cutting through all that by considering not how the Spanish speakers could get to sound more like the first-language English speakers, but instead how all four of them could sound more like the accent the quartet needed to sing in. For no four people produce their voices exactly alike, and even those who have a strong agreement on regional rendition of particular vowels, sung English usually aims to move away from regional specificities to a national or international genre norm.

This year's winners, Patchwork

LABBS Convention this year saw the UK’s second mixed quartet contest, following on from last year’s inaugural event. The standard was once again good, and the audience support enthusiastic, so it looks like it could be finding itself a regular fixture in the British barbershop year.

I reflected at some length after last year’s contest on the gender identity and voice-part identity interplays and instabilities that the genre brings out, and this year’s impressions are on similar themes.

The only picture I've found from the show itself: a bit grainy, but gives an impression...

One of the highlights for me at October's ladies' barbershop convention in Llandudno was the premiere of two arrangements commissioned by the Cottontown Chorus for the Saturday night show. The Meatloaf ballad 'Two Out of Three Ain't Bad' and a medley of a ridiculous number of other Meatloaf songs (35 minutes of original music crunched down to about 8 mins of a cappella!) were at the heart of their set, and provided the theme around which they built the rest.

This was a highlight for all the obvious reasons. Not just that it's exciting to hear one's creation come to life for the first time (a treat I also had over the weekend from Silver Lining), but that it's exciting to hear extended musical structures sung so well. And they had really gone to town on the staging, even building a mock Harley Davison out of an old chopper bike and bits of motorcycle.

Just before the recent LABBS convention, I came to the decision that I would stand down from the role of barbershop contest judge at the end of 2013. I have told my judging colleagues, and I am choosing to tell you in my blog so that it won’t be too much of a surprise to you next time we meet at a barbershop event and I’m not on duty. With any luck we may even get to talk about something other than this when we next meet!

It is simply that I have been serving as a registered judge for 13 years and feel like that's enough for now, thank you.

You know how it is when somebody gives you a piece of cake, and you think, 'Ooh how exciting!' And then they offer you another piece, and you think, 'Lovely!' When they offer you a third piece, the cake is as nice as it ever was, but you're a bit less excited by it. Sensible people don't wait until they've stopped enjoying it to stop eating.

No, I don't mean the musical equivalent of a stripogram; the post I am talking about here is that particular feature of barbershop arrangements when a song is finished with a long (sometimes very long) note.

The post is nearly always the tonic note, and its origin is as the final note of the melody. In traditional short-form barbershop songs such 'Heart of my Heart' or 'My Wild Irish Rose', you can hear this very clearly - the post is simply a matter of sustaining the end of the melody through a short embellishment that tidies up the end of the song and finishes it neatly.

October by the sea: why they invented the phrase 'bright and breezy'The weekend saw the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers head to North Wales for their annual Convention. One of the things it is easy to take for granted when it works, but which should not go unremarked, is the efficiency and competence of the event's organisation.

Saturday was dominated by a mammoth chorus contest, with the first singers on stage at 10 am and the last scheduled for 6.25 pm, so it is more than a little impressive that the whole thing only lost three minutes over the course of the day. The Convention Team and stage crew need to feel very pleased with themselves about this, as it makes the experience so much better for competitors (who can therefore pace their preparation accurately) and audience (who can therefore be sure they get to see the groups they are particularly interested in).

Regular readers will be familiar with this theme from previous occasions when I have climbed up onto my soapbox, such as here), or more helpfully and less rantingly, here. So you know the general point already: if people insist on using parrot-fashion as a primary learning method, you can't be surprised if you end up with a choir of bird-brains. Follow the links for the reasoning, we don't need to repeat it all again.

Instead I am going to share with you a penny-drop moment I had when in recent dialogue with some proponents of the Kodály method. For those who are not very familiar with their approach, it is all about building musicianship. A combination of singing and clapping and gestural vocabulary helps build a robust inner musical landscape that acts as a foundation for all other musical activity. It's good stuff.

I'm writing this post while in the middle of arranging a song destined to be part of a barbershop contest package. So I am thinking very specifically about the craft of producing contest-grade barbershop, though I suspect I may find myself ranging more widely by the time I'm done. It is very much writing-to-figure-out-exactly-what-this-thought-I-am-trying-to-have mode, so I may ramble. You have been warned.

(Of course, if the thought ends up being especially trite, I have the option of never posting it. Though I might enjoy the irony of engaging in deep thought to come up with a truism. That in itself might say something about the subject.)

So, 'hack' is the phrase used in stand-up comedy for material on themes that are over-used. It is an insult that includes both lack of creativity (you couldn't think of anything original to say) and laziness (you came up with the most obvious joke, then stopped working). The term is, I imagine, derived from 'hackneyed' in the more general sense, as tired and clichéd, but there is a specificity to its usage in comedy that I find interesting.