A Cappella

Well, my second semester musicianship class on vocal close harmony is over. The students have had 11 one-hour classes on a style that was completely new to them, and have each produced an arrangement which they’ll record in a quartet with three other students for their assignment. Consequently, my last class teaching activity for the year was working with the quartets to refine their performances prior to the recording session – a fine way to end the year in my view!

One of the things I have always enjoyed about this class is the way it combines specialist, technical learning with very holistic, general learning.

The standard method for arranging in the barbershop style sees three of the four parts constrained by particular rules. The lead has the tune, the bass goes below the lead and takes the root or the fifth of the chord, and the tenor should sit on top and move by small intervals, never greater than a fourth.

This means that the baritone part gets, as the cliché has it, all the left-over notes. It hops above and below the lead line to fill in the chord, and is constrained neither by rules of pitch content (it can take any note in the chord) nor type of movement (it can move by any interval). So it is defined entirely in negative terms – it is what all the other parts are not.

Arrangers deep in discussionWell, I’ve been collating the notes taken during the morning’s breakout sessions at last Sunday’s arrangers’ day (attached at the bottom of this post), and mulling on a number of miscellaneous other things that struck me during the day. Thanks to Katherine, David and Anne for taking the notes, by the way – it’s made a nice reminder for those who were there to participate, and something useful to share with those who couldn’t make it.

The following miscellany draws mostly on the afternoon’s workshop singing through people’s work-in-progess:

Yesterday saw just over 30 barbershop arrangers gathered together in Birmingham to exchange ideas and learn from each other. The day was designed for those who were beyond the beginner stage, but not yet entirely confident or established – and thus to provide a community for people who may be working with some sense of isolation. There were delegates from all three British barbershop organisations, plus one from Holland Harmony, and we were joined by about half of my Conservatoire class who are studying close-harmony arranging this semester.

Our keynote presentation came from Paul Davies, the UK’s most successful barbershop arranger. Paul took the chorus he founded, Cambridge Chord Company, to several gold medals in British and European contests, and picked up the Pavarotti Choir of the World trophy at Llangollen with a medley of parodies that mocked the Welsh (he’s brave as well as talented). CCC have also been more successful in International barbershop contests than any other British chorus by some considerable margin. They’ve done all this on Paul’s arrangements, so he is clearly someone worth inviting along to share his insights.

Okay, so it’s ultimately in the hands of singers whether they produce in-tune performances, but arrangers can have more of an influence on how well they achieve this than you might think. Here are three factors that can affect how well singers tune:

This my third post about the recent a cappella extravaganza I attended in Hounslow, and since I’ve used up all my well-developed conclusions from the event, but still have a note-book full of things I found interesting, this one is taking the form of a miscellany. I may come back to think about some of these in more depth when I’ve lived with them for a while.

Vox Concordia with Wendy NieperSwindon Scratch Choir

I talked in a recent post about the range and variety of groups participating in last week’s Sing A Cappella day in Hounslow. This variety made it possible to see some interesting relationships between, on one hand, people’s working practices and their relationship with musical content, and on the other people’s musical background and their habits of phrasing and articulation.

Jonathan Rathbone working his arrangement in the plenary sessionSunday 29th March saw hordes of a cappella singers congregating in Hounslow for a day that was billed as the inaugural event of a new British Contemporary A Cappella Society. Eight different groups participated in a day that involved coaching from ex-Swingle singers Jonathan Rathbone, Joanna Forbes, Wendy Nieper and Mark Williams, framed by plenary warm-up sessions, performances and workshopping one of Jonathan’s arrangements. I went along to observe and network (and being there without an ensemble earned me privilege of a badge that labelled me as ‘Individual Liz’ – something I shall treasure for all time), and came away with a notebook full of thoughts that will feed this blog for some posts to come.