A Cappella

A cappella group the Magnets performed at the Midlands Arts Centre on Friday night in a show in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust. I hadn’t heard them since 2002 or so, and was surprised to recognise many of the faces – apparently they’ve only had one permanent change of line-up in all that time (though they have had one temporary dep recently to cover a paternity leave).

It was an entertaining evening. All the singers create an easy and personably rapport with their audience from the opening, giving you the feeling you are being sung to, not just performed at. The show was also very well crafted, with a pleasing variety of pace, mood and visual impact. Each half of the show built to and away from a major focal point – the beat-box solo in the first half, an A-Z compilation for a game of name-that-band in the second – with fluent transitions throughout. It was striking how little talking they did (note: they didn’t need the padding to fill the programme) and that the few spoken interludes were well-placed and efficient.

I’ve been thinking recently about the visual dimension of musical performances, and cultural attitudes about High Art and vulgarity. The immediate spur for these thoughts was the Sweet Adelines convention in Birmingham, but they’re also plugging into things I’ve been thinking about at least since my PhD days.

So, the concern with costume and make-up and general blingification is of course the aspect of barbershop that people affiliated with other genres sometimes take as evidence of triviality. It’s The Music that matters, they say, not all this frippery stuff. Diamante earrings and choreography are tricksy things in this view, at best distracting the audience from the Real Thing that is The Music, and at worst trying to disguise the fact that the music isn’t very good. It’s all style-over-substance, is the criticism.

One of the highlights of last weekend’s BABS Convention, for me, was hearing Cottontown Chorus premiere four arrangements I had done for them based on the music from Mary Poppins. The big song-and-dance numbers were of course a wonderful arranging challenge, but it’s their ballad, ‘Feed the Birds’, I’d like to talk about today. I found it a fascinating song to arrange because it is so emotionally rich in effect, though its most memorable lyrics are utterly mundane. It is a wonderful case study in indirectness of expression, of how to evoke a deep emotional response without ever really stating in the lyric why anyone should care.

Cottontown flying kites to finish their show setLast weekend saw British barbershoppers descend in droves on Llandudno for the 2011 BABS convention. This one was a special one for me in several ways. First, because I had the honour of hearing no fewer than eight of my arrangements receive their first performances. Five were in the chorus contest (sung by Telfordaires, Tuxedo Junction and the Cottontown Chorus), one in the quartet finals (sung by the Serious Chord Squad), and two in the Sunday afternoon show. Current LABBS gold medallists Amersham A Cappella and retiring BABS champs, the Great Western Chorus, also aired arrangements of mine in the Saturday night show.

Warming up on Saturday morningI was back in the Bristol area for the weekend to work with Fascinating Rhythm chorus. Since I last coached them they had had a very successful contest experience, scoring an average of 71.8 at LABBS Prelims in April,* a significant jump in their scores since the previous November. One of the questions that we faced for the weekend was to what extent was a case of out-performing themselves as a fluke and to what extent it represented a leap in standard that was capable of consolidation.

I realised overnight on Saturday that I had been pushing the chorus considerably harder than I had on my last visit, and reflected that it was probably a subliminal response to their new higher scores, and in two dimensions. On one hand, I was responding to assumptions I had about the working methods and levels of discipline and stamina it takes to get to a level that scores in the 70s, so was going in to work at that level of intensity. On the other, I was expecting a certain standard of performance, and anytime I didn’t get it, I worked at getting the quality up to that suggested by their recent success.

Symphony Hall's central thoroughfare, thronged with chorus singersThe weekend saw Sweet Adelines Region 31 come to Birmingham for their annual convention. Symphony Hall is an expensive venue for this kind of event, but it does provide a wonderful environment. It’s not just that the auditorium is designed so well for acoustic performance (the judges remarked they’d never been at a contest venue of this size before without people needing amplification), but the social areas are so nicely integrated into the city. Of course I could be biased about my home patch, but I’d like to think I’m grateful for good venues wherever they can be found!

Both quartet and chorus contests were of an impressive quality. Both had clear winners out in front of the pack (Finesse and Forth Valley Chorus respectively), but 2nd-5th places were hotly contested in both competitions, giving a real excitement to the results. And in the lower-placed ensembles, all the performances were of creditable quality – all managed to make entertaining contributions to the weekend.

Back in December, Dan Newman wrote a wonderful post about the living through that moment in the arranging process that lies between the groundwork and the realisation. This is how he describes the experience:

I’m currently in the Land of Potential under the Shadow of OverAmbition. It’s a scary place.

This is the point in the process I have described as ‘magic happens here’, and I think anyone who arranges regularly will empathise exactly with Dan’s description of what this moment is like.

Tuesday night saw me returning to the London City Singers for a refresher on the things we’d worked on at their retreat back in February. This gave me another chance to learn about how people retain things we’ve worked on together – a central part of my ongoing quest to become ever more effective as a coach, and to understand the inner workings of my fellow singers.