A Cappella

I spent Sunday afternoon with NoteOrious working with them on a new medley which I had arranged for them last year. (One of the challenges of writing this post is going to be making musically useful comments that make sense without naming the songs involved, as I don’t want to steal their thunder for when they want unleash it on an unsuspecting world.)

But it was a great moment in its development to work on it – they know it well enough that memory issues were infrequent and transient, but it’s not yet been so rehearsed that it becomes difficult to make changes. Indeed, it struck me that their depth of experience as a quartet shows as much in their capacity to respond quickly to coaching input and retain the changes as in their well-developed performance skills. They have become adept at making effective use of their coaching time.

I wrote some years back about how I don’t really hold with jiggering with other people’s arrangements – not least because of seeing some rather inept changes to mine over the years. And I still hold this view: if an arrangement isn’t working in some way, it’s much better to refer back to the original arranger in the first instance for a solution, as they will have spent a lot of time thinking about how the thing works already, and need to be told if and when things don’t sing as well as they planned.

A somewhat different experience is when the arranger whose work you’re messing with is your own past self.

CleftomaniaLast week I had my first experience of coaching by Skype. I know some people have been doing this for some years, but I had been somewhat hesitant because my experience of the technology in its early days had been quite frustrating. It was okay as an alternative to the phone – you could live with the problems of intermittent sound and the picture freezing in return for the lack of cost and novelty of the video contact. But I had reservations about using it for something that is such a full-sensory experience as coaching.

I was persuaded to give it a go, though, by the quartet Cleftomania, who are based in Portugal. I went out to work with them last year, and will be heading out there again later this month. Not unreasonably, they’d like coaching more often than once a year, but budget and logistics make this difficult. So we gave it a try.

MacFourI had a trip up to Edinburgh at the weekend to work with MacFour quartet. They are a well-established ensemble with a consistent track record both as performers in their locality and in Sweet Adelines contest. Their goal for the coaching session was therefore to explore new rehearsal and performance techniques that will help them build on the skills they have already embedded. They have a really secure technical control over what they do, and wanted to focus the artistic and communicative aspects of their performance.

It was clear when we were corresponding to set up the trip that they are an organised quartet, and they like to have clear sense of method. So the task wasn’t simply a case of working on repertoire, but of providing them with processes and vocabulary they could apply beyond the specific songs we worked on.

The Great British Barbershop Boys perform their mammoth 'history of song' in the foyer

Last Sunday saw the British Association of Barbershop Singers coming to my old home patch of Birmingham Conservatoire for their annual Quartet Prelims. This is the event at which quartets compete to qualify for the Convention in May, and at which the Youth Quartet and Senior Quartet contests are held. It has become an increasingly well-supported event in the barbershop calendar, both by quartets and by supporters.

This year they had over 50 entrants, and as a result chose to split the quartets between the venue’s two concert halls into parallel competitions. All the Senior quartets appeared in the Adrian Boult Hall, all the Youth quartets in the Recital Hall, and the quartets in the main contest were split between the two.

Harrogate International Centre: viewed from aboveLast weekend saw the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers return to their favourite venue for their annual convention. It was a week earlier than its usual spot in the calendar this year, so it overlapped with the Sweet Adelines International Convention in Houston, where LABBS 2005 and 2009 champions Finesse were making history as the first British quartet to reach an international top-10 placing.

Note-Orious 8: International silver medallists Note-Orious sing with National silver medallists Note-Orious 4 in the afterglowI spent last weekend in Galway as a judge for the Irish Association of Barbershop Singers’ convention. The association is one of the world’s smallest at around 250 members, but proportionately to the population of Ireland, this is as at least as high a participation rate as in other countries, and the convention sees an impressively high proportion of them attending.

The event punches above its weight in the barbershop calendar. This is because in addition to its national contests for quartets and choruses, it has an international dimension. Many new but ambitious quartets from Europe dip their toes into the water of contest for the first time over there, so people have learned to keep an eye on the Irish Convention for the coming new talent.

Magenta at MozFest, July 2011Tomorrow, my choir will be five years old. I will do my best not to be too self-indulgent in this moment of celebration, but anyone who has ever started anything from scratch will understand that combination of astonishment and gratitude that arises from the discovery that other people are not just willing, but happy to join in your project and make it happen.

I shouldn’t be surprised of course. People like to sing; choirs are popping up all the time. But this was the first time it was my fault the choir existed. Scary.