A Cappella

This is another of those posts where I ruminate on the observations that collect in my notebook over a stimulating weekend, this time from my adventures with Holland Harmony. Many of these, I discover now I try to organise them, are about making connections between things I had already been aware of in ways which illuminate both.

Okay, this might be a long one. The subject is huge, even within the specific focus I am going to try to maintain for this post. Better get a cup of tea before we start.

During my schooldays, I learned the word 'pikey' as a colloquial adjective for miserly, niggardly. Its meaning emerged through contextual usage, with a particular emotional flavour. At some point during my teens I saw the word used as a noun, scrawled in graffiti near a gypsy encampment, and thereby learned to my surprise that it was a racial slur.

I don't have such a clear memory of the moment of revelation when I learned that the word 'cotton-picking', heard in cartoons in my childhood, likewise carried huge cultural baggage. But I can clearly remember the days of innocence when it was just sound, a mannerism used as an intensifier to give a certain rhythm and tone to the speech.

Every time I finish an arrangement, I realise the bits I am most proud of are the bits that nobody else will ever notice. In fact, this is why I am proud of them: they are usually the places where I struggled with some technical or artistic problem, but have found a solution that appears perfectly natural. The whole point is not to have anyone be impressed with the ingenuity of how I solved it, it’s for them never to notice there was a problem in the first place.

I have written over the years in general terms about this phase of the arranging process, and in more detail about how to generate a smooth and singable line that allows performers to commit to the song’s message without too much interference from their inner Manager.

The Buzz: They did sing an 8-parter with Crossroads, but I had run out of battery by then, so no pic...

The weekend after my adventures at BinG! Harmony College, I was at serving on the faculty at another Harmony College, this time in the Netherlands. I’m going to try to avoid talking about Holland Harmony’s event primarily in terms that compare it with Germany’s and treat it as a subject in its own right as it deserves.

But just to get the comparisons out of the way, I’ll note that it wasn’t just the proximity in dates that make it tempting to consider them side by side. They both had a similar structure, with a contest on the first evening, an informal sign-up show on the Saturday night, and a final show-and-tell performance session to finish the weekend. There were also several faculty members in common between the two events.

Welcoming the assembled delegates

Over the weekend I was back in Oberwesel with my friends from BinG! (Barbershop in Germany) for their Harmony College. Like last year, I come home with a note-book full of ideas to digest and a heart full of the nourishment you get from events that are intensive both musically and interpersonally.

As an experience for repeat visitors, it offered both continuity and familiarity, and a sense of change and renewal. You could say this of the faculty list, which included returners from last year like me, returners from previous years, and faces completely new to BinG!, and also of the content and organisation of the school. New for this year were opportunities for quartet singers to participate in the college choruses, a taster ‘extreme quartet experience’ scheme intended to make quartet activity accessible to those who didn’t have a quartet to come to the school with, as well as a different selection of classes on offer.

I spent Saturday with my friends at Brunel Harmony in Saltash. They’ve seen a lot of changes since I was with them last year, and will be heading to LABBS Convention in the autumn with a rather smaller chorus than last year and a new director out front. And the changes had meant they were slightly behind themselves in terms of the preparation schedule they might have chosen.

But don’t let any of those circumstances worry you: they are in fine fettle and good voice. There is an impressiveness to the body of sound you can generate with a large chorus, but the clarity a smaller group can produce has its own exciting qualities. And notwithstanding the changes, there is still plenty of continuity of experience, which allowed us to build on last year’s work on breath and characterisation.

Royce's Very Useful ExerciseA warm and sunny Sunday afternoon took my down to Ruislip to work with my friends at Capital Connection on the new contest package they are preparing for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers convention in the autumn. It’s a themed package that pairs a reasonably well-established song in the barbershop contest repertoire with a brand new arrangement by the chorus’s director Debi Cox. I had worked with her earlier in the year on the latter, as part of my arranger consultancy services, so it was rewarding to go and see the chart on the next stage of its journey.

The songs were at the stage where the technical demands and the overall concepts were well under control, so it was time to dig deeper for shape, colour, nuance. Debi had built in some wonderful opportunities for exploiting different vocal colours in the set-up to her arrangement, so we started out exploring the contrasting soundworlds those implied.

On reflection, these are all specific examples of general principles I have written about elsewhere. But they are points that have come to my notice through listening to performances and working with ensembles as details with which arrangers can help singers produce better performances with less rehearsal time.

1. Keep the lead off 7ths. Obviously, if the melody is on the 7th of the chord, the lead will sing it. But if you want to write a swipe that involves the lead coming off the melody note, you have a choice. If you have them move upwards onto the 7th of a barbershop 7th chord, especially if it is in the mid-upper part of their range, my observation is that they will almost invariably treat it melodically, and swell into it. As a result, the 7th will pop out of a completely unbalanced chord.

   This is the case even with really quite good groups. I heard several instances of this with quartets scoring in the 70s at BABS Convention this year. Indeed, it was here that I spotted it as an issue: one unbalanced chord from an otherwise good quartet is just a momentary distraction, but three in an afternoon is a pattern.