A Cappella

One of the dilemmas that faces any performer is how, on one hand, to keep their material fresh and interesting in performance while, on the other, rehearsing it deeply to a state of polish and absolute reliability. Or, to put it more bluntly, how do you stop yourself getting bored? Obviously, bringing new material in is part of the mix, but you can’t just keep throwing out the old too quickly, both because that is very wasteful of rehearsal time, but more importantly because both technical expertise and depth insight are built on extended engagement with the material.

This is what I went to help Signature Singers with last Sunday. They have a contest set that they are not done with in terms of the skills and artistry the songs will help them develop, but they were feeling a bit bogged down with it all. Their heads knew they would benefit from working with the songs further, but their hearts were getting a bit jaded.

Hey Big Spender!

I spent Saturday afternoon in London doing a bespoke workshop with the Barberfellas, an a cappella ensemble who all also sing with the Pink Singers choir. As their name implies, they specialise in close-harmony music, some of which is barbershop in the purists’ sense (you don’t get much more classic than arrangements by Ed Waesche), and some more stylistically varied, including some material arranged in-house.

My remit for the afternoon fell into two main areas: first a focus on building the classic barbershop ‘ring’ in the sound, and second some work on engaging the audience, both through stagecraft and generating musical expression and variety in performance.

Hmm, it was actually nicer walking along the seafront than this makes it look!

Like many of the UK’s barbershop population (and more than a few from overseas), I spent the bank holiday weekend in Llandudno for the British Association of Barbershop Singers Convention. It seems the convention is getting near to growing out of Venue Cymru - not only did they have to run the prime show twice there was so much demand for tickets, but the main arena is getting too small for the numbers who want to watch the contests. It was also significantly harder to get a table in a restaurant than in previous visits, which tells you something about the relationship between major venues and the surrounding businesses.

If my mother were writing this post, it would be tagged under my Soapbox category, and it would be a vehement denouncement of the use of the semitone key lift as a device for adding interest to repeated material. There would be particular attention to the work of John Rutter, in which she contends that it is a formulaic trick, so over-used that instead of perking up her attention it makes her heart sink with a feeling of ‘Oh no, not again’.

However, I have not yet entirely turned into my mother, so I am not going to be quite so doctrinaire. But neither am I resisting the inevitable process of family resemblance, so I’ll say she does have something of a point.

I spend rather more of my time in a cappella, as opposed to accompanied, choral worlds than she does, and so my reservations about semitone key lifts are more based around how badly they are often sung. The standard quip is that their main function is to allow a flatting ensemble to end in the same key that they started in.

The Contemporary A Cappella Stream in performance

I spent Sunday at the fifth annual A Cappella Spring Fest to be held in the Cornerstone arts centre in Didcot. It’s a rather wonderful event, hosted by a couple of local choirs, whose ongoing collaboration has produced slick organisation and a confident and helpful team. If you’re anywhere near Oxfordshire on the second weekend in March next year, I’d recommend it as a way to spend a day with 120 like-minded singers.

The day involves plenary sessions at start and end for warm-up and work on the Fest Song all together in the morning, and then performances in the afternoon. It then offers a choice of classes for two sessions, then two sessions in genre-themed groups working on a piece to share at the end of the day. This year there were streams for gospel, classical, barbershop, a new-to-a-cappella group, and I was leading the contemporary a cappella stream.

Last weekend brought a visit from mixed quartet MasterMix for a coaching session. I’ve worked with a few long-distance quartets in my time, but this one is raising the stakes rather in terms of logistics: not content with a journey between Derbyshire and Essex to sing together, they bring their bass in from Sweden. It seems appropriate, really, that their first two contests together will have been in Ireland (last autumn) and Spain (coming up in April).

Long-distance quartets typically have a skill profile in which the individual singers are operating initially at a higher level than the whole. They will often have considerable experience in other ensembles through which they have honed their skills, and are motivated to take on the extra travel to work together by the opportunity to sing with people who can bring this experience to the table. By the same token, their opportunities to learn how they are going to operate as a unit are relatively few compared to a local quartet, but commensurately more intensive. If they can only meet every few weeks, they make a proper weekend of it.

This post started out as noting some info I wanted to share with the people who are starting with Magenta this New Year. And as I typed, facts blossomed into explanations, and I thought: you know what, I could publish this as a blog post rather than just sending it round by email, just in case anyone else finds it useful. Most of how choirs develop, after all, is by people sharing their ideas, and other people thinking, ‘Oh, I could just adapt that for my lot, and it would exactly meet such-and-such need.’

So, to our new singers: you will have already seen these things happening when you came to observe a rehearsal before joining. These are the protocols and rationales that lie behind the behaviours you observed.

So, after reflecting recently on how barbershop has certain emotional registers that feel more central to the genre that others - in particular certain flavours of nostalgia - I started to think about the genre’s relationship with comedy. The vaudeville heritage of the style roots it in light entertainment, and indeed the outsider’s stereotypical view of the genre is that its default setting is to get you laughing.

(As I document in Chapter 4 of my barbershop book, one of the things I discovered when I started writing about the genre was that if you show a room full of musicologists a video clip of men in pink tuxedos singing a ballad, they will snigger, even if the song is a heartfelt paean to love lost. It was fun, mind you, when I started giving papers that opened with this phenomenon and then went on discuss why outsiders felt the need to laugh.)