A Cappella

Cleftomania on the small screenSince my post back in February about working with the quartet Cleftomania in Portugal using Skype, I have continued to have regular sessions with them - about once a fortnight up until the Spanish Association of Barbershop Singers convention in April, and once a month since then. As the initial shock to the system of the new medium has receded, and we have slipped into a sense of routine, I have started to notice some rather more subtle idiosyncrasies of the experience and their effect on what we do and how we do it.

Last weekend saw BABS heading to Southport for their 38th annual Convention under gloriously sunny skies.

The big story of the weekend was the presence of International silver medallists, the Musical Island Boys not only as visiting performers, but also as competitors. They had been unable to participate as planned in the Pan-Pacific convention earlier this year, and so the BHS had agreed to let them use the BABS contest as the occasion at which to compete for a qualifying score for the International Convention in Portland in July.

On the Sunday morning of the recent Sweet Adelines convention in Birmingham, delegates had the opportunity to participate in a workshop led by Sound Category judge Sandy Marron and Showmanship Category judge Judy Pozsgay. They work as a team in their own chorus, the increasingly successful Lion's Gate Chorus in Vancouver, and their material saw a wonderful integration between what are often seen as quite disparate aspects of barbershop craft.

I plan to write in more detail about the integration of vocal and movement skills in another post (it was originally part of this one, but grew into a separate one its own right), so will focus today on Sandy's approach to vocal pedagogy.

Sweet Adelines were back in Birmingham at the weekend for the second year running for their annual convention at Symphony Hall. I commented last year about how the region’s healthy state is clearly audible in the quality of the performances they are producing, but this year’s contests were a clear step up from there.

The quartet contest was hotly contested, with a strong field of well-established quartets and experienced quartet singers dominating the top ten places. Gold medallists Echo, for example, were only in their second year as a quartet, but have the experience of two previous gold medallists within the line-up, while the second and third place quartets, Miss-Demeanour and Fortuity are the 2010 and 2011 LABBS champions respectively.

Monday night saw me back on my old home patch in Colchester, coaching the chorus that gave me my first induction into barbershop, Colne Harmony - recently rebranded as Chorus Iceni. They now rehearse in a hall a scant five minutes' walk away from where I lived in my last year in the town, so it felt like a return home in more ways than one.

In other ways, of course, it's a very different chorus from the one I left in 1999. As well as the new name, there are lots of new faces on the risers, bringing the chorus up to possibly the largest size it has ever been. There is also a new directing team in place since last autumn. Iam James and Nickie Williams are both experienced performers and coaches, though new to directing, so my task was to help them work on their technique at the same time as we worked with the chorus

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The weekend took me back up to Edinburgh to work with my friends MacFour Quartet again. I last saw them in November, when our focus was on digging deep into their songs to explore the depths of their expressive detail. With 6 weeks to go before the annual Sweet Adelines regional contest, our task this time was to get the Manager off duty and the Communicator to the fore.

We had booked the session a couple of months ago, and in the meantime miscellaneous circumstances (filed under the category of Real Life) had arisen that meant that only three of the quartet were available on each of the Friday evening and Saturday sessions. The quartet’s stickability and experience showed through in the fact that they did not consider this a reason not to go ahead. It’s as much in these matters of organisation and attitude that a quartet’s longer-term success can be gauged as in their vocal and musical prowess.

Earlier this month, BABS and LABBS held their triennial joint re-certification school, at which judges from both organisations are required to formally qualify in order to continue their service. This undertaken with the help of visiting judges in each category from the Barbershop Harmony Society, who play a role both in leading training and overseeing the assessments.

The Music Category was delighted to welcome current Category Specialist Jim Kahlke, who as well as all the usual virtues you see in people who take on this mantle, has a happy knack for drawing pictures of ideas. So I thought I’d share a couple of them that have resonance beyond the specificities of barbershop judging. I’m pretty sure that both sets of ideas were attributed to other members of the category (Roger Payne and Kathy Greason respectively, if I recall), but I’m calling them Jimbob’s here because it’s his drawings we’re looking at.

Saturday saw me back with my friends Fascinating Rhythm to work with them on David Wright’s arrangement of ‘South Rampart Street Parade’. It is a classic chart for reasons that I came away with a renewed appreciation for, and it is a good choice for them at their current stage of development: they have to raise their game to sing it, but it is a challenge within their reach. And it has that wonderful characteristic that, tricky as it is, it lifts performers – it actually helps them out-perform what they previously thought they were capable of.