A Cappella

As many of Ladies & Gentlemen as I could snap in a restricted spaceI spent part of the Friday afternoon at last weekend’s convention coaching Ladies and Gentlemen, a mixed project chorus who had come over from Holland to perform on the shows. The singers - over 80 of them - are drawn from across the country, and they had had a total of 10 rehearsals and a couple of warm-up performances in preparation for coming to Harrogate. They are plannning to continue until the Dutch convention next spring, making it a project of about 15 months in total.

I know their director, Wil Saenen, from her time as a judge in the Singing Category, and there were also several familiar faces amongst the singers from groups I’ve met when travelling to Holland Harmony/DABS and European conventions in Eindhoven. There were also a number of singers for whom this is their first barbershop experience - several people I spoke to were proud of the fact that they had made this an open-access chorus, without requiring previous experience to participate.

Cheshire Chord Co in their winning performance

In many ways this last weekend was very typical for the one that takes October into November. It is the standard time of year for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers to hold their annual convention, and it was back in one of their frequently-used convention venues, the Harrogate International Centre. But there was one strange thing for me: it was the first LABBS convention since 1997 at which I didn’t spend a day or more behind the judges’ table.

There were obvious ways in which I noticed the difference. I had more time to hang out and chat to friends (and also to have conversations relevant to my new role in LABBS looking after director education.) I could pop out during the day for a breath of fresh air. I could do some coaching - of which more in my next post.

Sunday took me up to Scunthorpe to participate in a Festival of Choirs at the rather wonderful Baths Hall. It was an ambitious day’s music-making, with an afternoon of workshops followed by a combined concert involving nine choirs in the evening. It became clear in conversation that it had also attracted a considerable number of singers who weren’t in the concert choirs along to the workshops (and, I would hope, as audience members). The place was thronged, and had a really lively buzz about it. They were already plotting to repeat the experience next year.

I had been asked to do a workshop on barbershop, running it twice with two different groups. It was an interesting challenge - we had just over an hour in which to both introduce the central elements of the style and get a good amount of meaningful music-making done. It would be all too easy to spend the whole time grappling with notes and words without finding space to put the resultant chords and meanings into context. Equally, it was important that the participants spent a lot more time singing than I did talking.

Same sofa, same hippo, different quartetSunday afternoon brought a new quartet, Quantum, around for some coaching. They’re new as a quartet, but have a considerable amount of barbershop experience between them, and, oddly enough, the only one I didn’t already know happens to live just round the corner from me. So that was handy for them.

For any quartet in their early days - no matter how much prior experience they have between them - one of the primary tasks is building the ensemble. All their previous quartets will have developed musicianship and vocal control and performance skills which will come in useful for this task, but the actual crafting of their new sound and modes of delivery is still from scratch. So, we started straight in on duetting as the primary tool for all the singers to learn about each other’s voices.

Of course you can't go more than half a bar in arranging a cappella music before you find a note in the melody that doesn't belong to the prevailing harmony, so in some ways this post is about a central and obvious thing arrangers are always looking at anyway. But a couple of projects earlier this year (songs from Sondheim and the Beatles) have got me thinking about this specifically in terms of how questions of timbre affect our choices.

Non-chord tones in a vocal melody floating across a backwash of instrumental accompaniment have a whole different sonic effect from those same notes sung in a texture where the accompanying harmonies are of the same type of sound as the melody. Sung accompaniments pull the vocal non-chord tones into the chord where instrumental backing lets them stand apart. In a cappella textures, you are much more likely to find a melodic note infecting the harmony, changing its colour.

So, what strategies do we have to deal with this?

One of the events that got me thinking on my recent trip to the Edinburgh Fringe was the last of a series of lectures about comedy and culture from researchers at Brunel University’s Centre for Comedy Studies and Research. The one we went to was by Leon Hunt, and as well as focusing on the work a particular comedy duo, did some nice analysis of the concept of dark comedy. I do like a spot of theorising, as you know.

The thing that particularly got me thinking was the phrase ‘pushing the envelope’. This is a formulation that gets bandied around a fair bit in comedy, and you also hear it all the time in barbershop’s various debates about style. There are some interesting parallels and differences in the way the phrase gets deployed in these two worlds, and I have been saving the idea up to have a think about. Now I’m home again, it’s time to mull.

On Thursday I finally made it up to Warrington to work with the Cheshire Chord Company. The visit had been scheduled for last month, but an accident on the M6 had on that occasion turned Birmingham to gridlock, and saw me spending an hour and 20 minutes to travel 8 miles and never even getting out of my home town. This time the M6 was really quite clear (by M6 standards, that is), and I was about the third person to arrive there!

One bright side to the postponement was that in the meantime the notes I had made on the chorus’s prize-winning performance at Llangollen International Eisteddfod had turned into a post on interpreting ballads. So, those chorus members who read my blog were already primed with some of the concepts we were going to be working with. There were just a handful of places where harmonic details or melodic shaping in the harmony parts suggested slight changes to the way they were delivering the melody.

Sunday took me over to Coventry to work with my friends the Belles of Three Spires. They are deep into their preparation for the Ladies Association of Barbershop Singers convention in the autumn, and the day was booked to give the opportunity for some detailed, in-depth work on their contest package.

One theme to emerge during the day was singing not just accurately, but with expressive purpose. The breath-points aren’t there just to breathe, for instance, they are there to articulate the moments in the story where the protagonist has the realisation that motivates the next line. The words tell us what is going on, but the harmony tells us how the protagonist feels about it. Most importantly for their ballad, the melody is the heart of the song.