A Cappella

A week ago Saturday took me down to Bristol to coach Bristol A Cappella, in anticipation of their trip to Wuppertal to compete in the World Mixed Barbershop Chorus contest hosted by BinG! in March. It will be their final contest outing for the Barbie set that they took to the European and the British national contests last year. As such, we were working with material they know very well, and so the brief was all about enhancing the execution of the well-established concept rather than re-imagining anything. The main areas I was asked to focus on were resonance, swooshithroughiness, and making sure the choreography was working well with the voices.

I spent Sunday happily in Norwich with Mosaic, a mixed-voice barbershop chorus who meet once a month, and who are preparing to participate in the British Association of Barbershop Singers’ Convention in May. Last year I had revoiced an arrangement for their contest set, and we spent a good deal of the day working on that, with a little TLC also on their other song.

The general trajectory of our work on both songs was to start from the holistic and work our way towards the detail. The reason for this is that global concepts often improve a lot of details at once, and so save you a lot of effort compared with diving immediately into the nitty-gritty. The chorus’s MD Chrissie had identified flow as a primary area she wanted to develop in the delivery of my arrangement, and it turned out that quite a lot of what we worked on with that song was also relevant to the other.

Steel City Voices - LABBS 2025 ChampionsThis year’s national convention of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers was set to be an exciting one from the outset, as we knew going into it that we would be seeing a new champion chorus for the first time in nearly 20 years. Since Signature’s win in 2006, the title has been shared between Amersham A Cappella, The Cheshire Chord Company and the White Rosettes, none of whom were competing this year.

The absence of the big three this year was a direct consequence of the affiliation agreement with the Barbershop Harmony Society that has allowed LABBS groups to compete that their International Convention. The White Rosettes made history as the first to represent LABBS on the international stage in 2025, and this July both Cheshire Chord Company and Amersham A Cappella were invited to participate.

I spent Saturday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella, revisiting their set from the European and BABS Conventions back in May in preparation for the World Mixed Chorus contest in Germany next Spring. By now they are deeply familiar with the music and their performance plans for it, and this presents the opportunity to do the kind of deep work that only becomes possible when you no longer have to focus on what you are doing and can direct your attention to the how.

Much of our work focused on listening techniques, finding ways to enhance everyone’s perception of what they were doing, since the first stage of refining your execution is increasing the acuity with which you hear the detail. Duetting inevitably played a part in this, with a lot of micro-adjustments making themselves through the process in addition to the explicit observations singers made as we walked through the process.

In my last post I shared some suggestions to help people develop the musicianship skills needed for singing on the off-beat. The second stage of the process is to consider the music that is asking you to deploy these skills and asking if the composer and/or arranger are facilitating your success or creating obstacles.

You see, off-beat passages are a classic example of the kind of thing a notation program can do really well, as it just produces a literal rendition untroubled by the sense-making that the human brain brings to the process of singing. And whilst sometimes (well, quite often) the problem is patchy musicianship skills in the performers, sometimes the problem is also over-optimism on the part of a writer who hasn’t spent enough of their life in rehearsal trying to help people with patchy skills achieve rhythmic security.

I left you last time with the following exercise, which reproduces the kind of thing you quite often see in a cappella arrangements, and turns out to offer a useful case study to explore this central musical question.

Every so often, it seems that everyone I talk to is grappling with the same challenges. Well, maybe not everyone, but enough to feel that we have something of a theme going on, and thus an opportunity to try to be helpful to multiple ensembles at once.

A conductor recently messaged me with the following clear summary of the problem:

a couple of our sections are having real trouble getting into singing off the beat. A good number of our songs have crotchet notes aligned on the half beat and they're often getting pulled into alignment with the beat instead. I wonder if you have any good ideas for how we can encourage off-beat singing?

This is kind of a niche post, as it’s about a specific challenge that we don’t come across very often. I have been arranging recently for a barbershop quartet which has a lead who more usually sings bass, which brings the melody into a rather lower tessitura than one usually uses in TTBB barbershop. This is a distinct challenge from arranging with the bass on the melody, which we do fairly frequently, although some of the things learned doing that turn out to be relevant.

Interestingly, the singer specified reference performances of the songs in the keys he wanted to sing them in, so we’re working with an established performance history of the songs in a lower tessitura. Also interesting was that a casual listen to these recordings gave me an impression of richness and warmth, but not particularly low pitch. I found myself surprised when I actually checked what keys the songs were in – and realised that particularly in one case that I had therefore a rather more challenging task than I had first imagined!

Friday night at Birmingham Pride

Well over half the Spring bank holiday weekends in my entire life have been spent at the British Association of Barbershop Singers Annual Convention. This year was the first of a new shape to the weekend, as it is also the weekend of Birmingham Pride which is a major fixture in Rainbow Voices’ calendar. Hence I spent the Friday night with them performing on the big stage at Pride, before heading down to Bournemouth to catch just the final day of the Convention.