A Cappella

A snapshot of the pre-convention set-up: let's not forget the behind-the-scenes efforts that make all the performances possible

Summer arrived suddenly in the UK at the end of last week, just in time for the annual convention of the British Association of Barbershop Singers. I was only there for one day again this year, as Rainbow Voices were performing at Birmingham Pride on the Friday night, but as it turned out, the changes in the convention schedule this year meant that I could see all the quartet contests, not just the national finals on the Sunday. The same changes meant however that I saw none of the choruses, so everything I know about those contests is entirely second-hand. Fortunately, when you turn up in Harrogate on a convention weekend, it doesn’t take long before you meet someone in the street to report on what you missed.

During her keynote address at LABBS Harmony College, Blair Brown briefly explored the issue of the gestures singers use in performance. It came in the context of the over-riding principle that our performances should be honest and meaningful, that we should bring our best selves to the stage in order generate a genuine human encounter with our listeners.

All too often, she observed, a singer’s gestures can become conventionalised, using standard forms that thus appear to betoken a sense of ‘I’m doing this because it’s what people do,’ rather than being personally meaningful. Blair described the style of ‘churning’ hands one often sees in quartet performances as ‘transactional’ and attributed its use to a desire to impress rather than to connect. As such, it can be a barrier to communication.

What is the collective noun for Harmony College Faculty?

The weekend saw about 300 members of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers gather together in Nottingham to nourish each other by learning together, making music, and fostering friendships old and new. You can tell by the terms of that headline description that it was a richly satisfying experience in many ways: if you were to analyse it in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs you’d be ticking boxes all the way up from Safety to Self Actualisation.

As a result I have piles of notes to sort through and it may take me some time to digest and organise all the ideas the event generated, so for today I’m just going to reflect on some of the things that helped the event leave us with such a glow.

I sometimes dither over titles, so when someone says, ‘You should make that the title for your blog post about tonight,’ I am more than happy to take the suggestion. It will take some explanation to establish why this was one of the key ideas to emerge from my recent coaching session with Fascinating Rhythm, but we will get there in due course.

Long-time readers will know that I have had a long and happy relationship with this chorus, who went through a phase of commissioning new contest material from me every year, and then inviting me to coach them on it. This pattern was disrupted first by covid and the subsequent rebuild, and more recently by a director change. Their new MD, Wendy Howse, is settled in now though and they are rediscovering their delight in bringing never-previously-heard arrangements to sing to their peers at Convention.

What is the collective noun for badgers?

I spent Saturday with Sporty Badger, Posh Badger, Scary Badger and Baby Badger, collectively known as Release the Badgers, working with them on their set for the upcoming LABBS Quartet Prelims contest. As you can imagine from their nomenclature choices, nothing silly happened at all. (Did you know that you can make any adjective more entertaining by inserting it before the word ‘badger’. You’re welcome.)

While their two songs contest songs are contrasted in mood and style, we found some common themes between them on areas that would benefit from TLC. This is useful for embedding skills: it means both that you get a good cost-per-wear on you work, since you can keep applying it in different musical contexts, and that these multiple opportunities for application give commensurately numerous opportunities for practice.

Wuppertal's glorious Historische Stadthalle: displaying flags from all 9 countries represented

Last weekend saw mixed barbershop quartets and choruses from nine different countries converge to compete at the world mixed championships, hosted by Barbershop in Germany alongside their own national championships. The last time I made to BinG!’s Barbershopmusikfestival was in 2018 (we were booked also to go in 2020, but we all know how that turned out…). This was the occasion of the inaugural World Mixed chorus contest, and it is interesting to see how – and how much – things have changed in the interim.

The World Mixed quartet contest has been established for longer so the changes here are less dramatic, though it shares what was for me the headline development: mixed barbershop appears at last to have a handle on choice of key. For the first few years after the introduction of mixed ensembles at barbershop conventions I was consistently commenting on the challenges of finding a key that works for all voices in the group.

I spent Sunday with SpecsAppeal working on a combination of things that were specific to the two songs they brought with them and things that will apply to everything they sing. Unlike my difficult-to-summarise exploration of musical detail in Scotland a couple of weeks ago, we found a clear theme emerging during the day that applied in multiple different contexts: the value of taking things slowly.

The first and most literal of these recurred throughout the day: blocking passages a chord at a time, taking time to make friends with each one before you move on. In a texture where you have a four-part chord for every melody note, there’s a lot of music going on, and your brain doesn’t have time to fully absorb it all as it flies by in tempo. If you stay with a chord until you can let go of your own note and attend to the whole, your brain can make sense of it, and provide all the microadjustments to tuning, balance, tone- and vowel-match to bring it into focus.

I’ve just spent a happy weekend with Albacappella at their chorus retreat just outside Aberdeen. My remit was to work with them on an arrangement they had commissioned for this year’s LABBS Convention, although we also looked at their other contest piece and did some more general technique work that will apply across the board.

Some coaching trips develop a theme that runs through all our work. Looking back on this one, it feels rather more miscellaneous in focus, and thus hard to summarise. I think this is mainly because it was organised primarily around musical detail rather than skill development, so our focus shifted according to the needs of the immediate musical context. The reason for this approach is that everyone was specifically interested in what an arranger had to say about why and how they ended up with what they were singing.