A Cappella

I spent Saturday afternoon and evening in Nottingham at the British Association of Barbershop Singers’ Harmony College, at which I had been invited to judge the contest that formed part of a stream called ‘Extreme Quartets’. This is a model that takes the idea of chamber music as practice gadget, and simultaneously supports and intensifies the experience.

The way it works is this. Participants learn a great pile of music in advance (in this case, six songs), and then spend the weekend receiving coaching on them, both as a chorus – re-living the original invention of the barbershop chorus as a way to deliver coaching to lots of singers simultaneously – and in a variety of quartet line-ups. The contest had a preliminary round in the afternoon, with the top two quartets and a randomly-picked third going through to the final in the Saturday evening show.

It is absurd to expect a group of amateur singers, two-thirds of whom have never sung together before (and some of whom have not sung since they left school), to learn a four-part close-harmony arrangement from scratch in less than three hours, isn't it? And you wouldn't necessarily expect them to keep the tonal centre rock steady throughout, would you? And it would certainly be too much to expect them to perform it from memory at the end of the afternoon, yes?

There is often a moment in the days before one of the workshops that Magenta periodically offers for our local Moseley Festival, that I too think this is impossible.

Tuesday evening saw me back with Phoenix chorus for an evening's coaching - nice not to leave it for six years before a re-match this time! My primary remit was to work with them on an arrangement they had commissioned from me last year, and which they have scheduled to perform in a couple of shows this September, though we also looked at a couple of other pieces to refresh our musical palate.

Most of our work was in the realms of musical characterisation, bringing out texture and colour implicit in the musical shapes. I always tend to think of this process as one of sculpting: developing the flat canvas of beautiful vocal tone into a more three-dimensional musical shape.

And at the end of the day, the draw for ConventionOn Saturday, the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers came to the Streetly Academy in north Birmingham to hold their preliminary contest round for quartets wishing to compete at the annual convention in the autumn. The really useful dimension of this event is not so much the competitive element (LABBS has not historically had so many quartets that we always need an elimination round for scheduling/logistical purposes), but its educational dimension.

Monday evening took me back to Essex for a repeat visit to Chorus Iceni in Colchester. I last saw them at the end of April, which is a long enough interval for them to have done a good deal of consolidation, yet short enough for me to have a clear memory of the level we were working at then. As a result, it was a delight to be able to tell them that I could really hear the difference they had made during the intervening rehearsals.

Two things in particular had clearly received attention since my last visit. The first was bubbling: not only was there a much greater continuity of airflow now, but everyone got on and undertook it with a sense of purpose. It is now an accepted part of the skill set rather than perceived as a difficult (and thus resisted) task. The second is that there is a noticeably more consistent sense of legato than before; given the benefits of bubbling, this is possibly not a coincidence.

Sunday saw me up in Warrington to work with the Cheshire Chord Company. Our primary task was getting inside a new ballad they are learning.* It is a relatively recent arrangement by David Wright, and is chock full of the kind of harmonic twists and turns he uses to turn the purposely limited chord vocabulary of the barbershop style to surprising and original effect.

It was clear that there was more in the music than we were going to be able to explore in only one day – but then isn’t always the case? – so the goal developed into a kind of double vision: to use the work on this specific music as a way to learn about the kinds of things it is possible to find, so that the chorus had methods they could continue to use on the parts of the song we didn’t have time to examine in detail. And, indeed, on entirely different songs.

Cleftomania on the small screenSince my post back in February about working with the quartet Cleftomania in Portugal using Skype, I have continued to have regular sessions with them - about once a fortnight up until the Spanish Association of Barbershop Singers convention in April, and once a month since then. As the initial shock to the system of the new medium has receded, and we have slipped into a sense of routine, I have started to notice some rather more subtle idiosyncrasies of the experience and their effect on what we do and how we do it.

Last weekend saw BABS heading to Southport for their 38th annual Convention under gloriously sunny skies.

The big story of the weekend was the presence of International silver medallists, the Musical Island Boys not only as visiting performers, but also as competitors. They had been unable to participate as planned in the Pan-Pacific convention earlier this year, and so the BHS had agreed to let them use the BABS contest as the occasion at which to compete for a qualifying score for the International Convention in Portland in July.