A Cappella

Symphony Hall's central thoroughfare, thronged with chorus singersThe weekend saw Sweet Adelines Region 31 come to Birmingham for their annual convention. Symphony Hall is an expensive venue for this kind of event, but it does provide a wonderful environment. It’s not just that the auditorium is designed so well for acoustic performance (the judges remarked they’d never been at a contest venue of this size before without people needing amplification), but the social areas are so nicely integrated into the city. Of course I could be biased about my home patch, but I’d like to think I’m grateful for good venues wherever they can be found!

Both quartet and chorus contests were of an impressive quality. Both had clear winners out in front of the pack (Finesse and Forth Valley Chorus respectively), but 2nd-5th places were hotly contested in both competitions, giving a real excitement to the results. And in the lower-placed ensembles, all the performances were of creditable quality – all managed to make entertaining contributions to the weekend.

Back in December, Dan Newman wrote a wonderful post about the living through that moment in the arranging process that lies between the groundwork and the realisation. This is how he describes the experience:

I’m currently in the Land of Potential under the Shadow of OverAmbition. It’s a scary place.

This is the point in the process I have described as ‘magic happens here’, and I think anyone who arranges regularly will empathise exactly with Dan’s description of what this moment is like.

Tuesday night saw me returning to the London City Singers for a refresher on the things we’d worked on at their retreat back in February. This gave me another chance to learn about how people retain things we’ve worked on together – a central part of my ongoing quest to become ever more effective as a coach, and to understand the inner workings of my fellow singers.

The weekend's judging panel: Alison, Alan, David, Liz, Linda, Rod and AnnekeI spent last weekend in Veldhoven for the combined Holland Harmony and the Dutch Association of Barbershop Singers convention. It was a nice size of convention – with a total of 21 each of competing quartets and choruses, it had enough participants to give a good sense of occasion, but neither contest was too long to feel like an endless slog. And there was time for every group to have a follow-up coaching session, too, which is so much more useful for onward development than mere spoken or written feedback.

Having judged at the last Holland Harmony convention two years ago, it seemed to me that both the number and standard of competitors had increased noticeably.

This is an up-dated version of the post I wrote last time I was inviting new arrangement requests. The main changes are the dates and some additional info about logistics

Having cleared my backlog of bespoke arrangements, I am now inviting requests for new ones. I’ll be looking for about 12 to do between May and October – so, if I get up to 12 requests, I’ll do all of them, but if I get more I’ll have to pick which ones to do. This post is, firstly, to talk about the logistics of the process, and secondly to explain how I’ll make the choices if that becomes necessary.

So, first the key dates:

Please get your requests to me by Thursday 21 April 2011 and I will let you know by the end of the month if you’ve been scheduled, and for when. At that point I will ask for a deposit to secure the arrangement slot, and if you don't get back to me within 2 weeks I'll offer it to someone else.

If you’ve already been in touch trying to get ahead of the game, you’ll need to send me your request again as I have no way of knowing if you’re still interested unless you tell me you are!

When you make a request, please include the following information:

CleftomaniaI spent last weekend in the Algarve, working with what are, as far as I know, Portugal’s only barbershop quartet and chorus. When Sylvy Wilks moved out to Portugal four years ago she wasn’t intending to introduce a whole new musical genre there, but she quite quickly found herself part of the local network of singing and performance groups. And when she was asked if she might help re-form a choir that had folded, she chose to make it a barbershop chorus as that was where her primary experience lay, having learned to sing herself with what was then Chiltern Harmony in Amersham. So by a combination of pure luck and the gumption to make things happen, Bella A Cappella was formed.

The main purpose of my visit was to help the quartet, Cleftomania, prepare for their first contest at the Spanish Association of Barbershop Singers convention next month. As well as competing, they will also be taking along a delegation from the chorus, partly as moral support, but mostly to show them why people get so excited about the convention experience. This is only the 2nd SABS convention, but it’s clear that last year’s inaugural event has already done a lot to strengthen the network of barbershop groups in the Iberian peninsula.

I had a return visit to Heartbeat Chorus in Cheshire on Sunday, to work in tandem with one of their other coaches, John Grant. John is an immensely efficient coach, effecting significant changes in performance with a few words and a brief demonstration, and it is both a pleasure and an education to watch him in action. I think the two things that lie at the heart of this efficiency are (a) his listening skills and (b) his ability to prioritise. In fact the two are linked: it is his acuity of perception that allows him to home in on precisely the issue that most needs attention.

The chorus is in good spirits, with their win at the Majestic Choir Festival in Torquay last month having given a useful confidence boost. But they are also developing rapidly, which brings its own inherent energy.

For all that people of my parents’ generation can be quite rude about the popular music of anyone even slightly younger than them (or is it just my Dad?; the way he tells it, the rot set in with the Rolling Stones), much of the music of the last 40 years uses a significantly wider melodic range than the tunes of the 30s, 40s and 50s to which they are unkindly compared. You often don’t notice just how rangy they are because the singers handle them so well. I hadn’t realised, for instance, how wide a range George Michael covers in ‘Kissing a Fool’ until I heard Michael Bublé (not precisely an inflexible singer himself) cop out of the high notes in his cover of the song.

These songs presents something of a challenge to the close-harmony arranger. With a range that may exceed in the melodic line alone the usual range expected of an entire close-harmony ensemble, what do you do? There are three main options: