A Cappella

Wuppertal's glorious Historische Stadthalle: displaying flags from all 9 countries represented

Last weekend saw mixed barbershop quartets and choruses from nine different countries converge to compete at the world mixed championships, hosted by Barbershop in Germany alongside their own national championships. The last time I made to BinG!’s Barbershopmusikfestival was in 2018 (we were booked also to go in 2020, but we all know how that turned out…). This was the occasion of the inaugural World Mixed chorus contest, and it is interesting to see how – and how much – things have changed in the interim.

The World Mixed quartet contest has been established for longer so the changes here are less dramatic, though it shares what was for me the headline development: mixed barbershop appears at last to have a handle on choice of key. For the first few years after the introduction of mixed ensembles at barbershop conventions I was consistently commenting on the challenges of finding a key that works for all voices in the group.

I spent Sunday with SpecsAppeal working on a combination of things that were specific to the two songs they brought with them and things that will apply to everything they sing. Unlike my difficult-to-summarise exploration of musical detail in Scotland a couple of weeks ago, we found a clear theme emerging during the day that applied in multiple different contexts: the value of taking things slowly.

The first and most literal of these recurred throughout the day: blocking passages a chord at a time, taking time to make friends with each one before you move on. In a texture where you have a four-part chord for every melody note, there’s a lot of music going on, and your brain doesn’t have time to fully absorb it all as it flies by in tempo. If you stay with a chord until you can let go of your own note and attend to the whole, your brain can make sense of it, and provide all the microadjustments to tuning, balance, tone- and vowel-match to bring it into focus.

I’ve just spent a happy weekend with Albacappella at their chorus retreat just outside Aberdeen. My remit was to work with them on an arrangement they had commissioned for this year’s LABBS Convention, although we also looked at their other contest piece and did some more general technique work that will apply across the board.

Some coaching trips develop a theme that runs through all our work. Looking back on this one, it feels rather more miscellaneous in focus, and thus hard to summarise. I think this is mainly because it was organised primarily around musical detail rather than skill development, so our focus shifted according to the needs of the immediate musical context. The reason for this approach is that everyone was specifically interested in what an arranger had to say about why and how they ended up with what they were singing.

A week ago Saturday took me down to Bristol to coach Bristol A Cappella, in anticipation of their trip to Wuppertal to compete in the World Mixed Barbershop Chorus contest hosted by BinG! in March. It will be their final contest outing for the Barbie set that they took to the European and the British national contests last year. As such, we were working with material they know very well, and so the brief was all about enhancing the execution of the well-established concept rather than re-imagining anything. The main areas I was asked to focus on were resonance, swooshithroughiness, and making sure the choreography was working well with the voices.

I spent Sunday happily in Norwich with Mosaic, a mixed-voice barbershop chorus who meet once a month, and who are preparing to participate in the British Association of Barbershop Singers’ Convention in May. Last year I had revoiced an arrangement for their contest set, and we spent a good deal of the day working on that, with a little TLC also on their other song.

The general trajectory of our work on both songs was to start from the holistic and work our way towards the detail. The reason for this is that global concepts often improve a lot of details at once, and so save you a lot of effort compared with diving immediately into the nitty-gritty. The chorus’s MD Chrissie had identified flow as a primary area she wanted to develop in the delivery of my arrangement, and it turned out that quite a lot of what we worked on with that song was also relevant to the other.

Steel City Voices - LABBS 2025 ChampionsThis year’s national convention of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers was set to be an exciting one from the outset, as we knew going into it that we would be seeing a new champion chorus for the first time in nearly 20 years. Since Signature’s win in 2006, the title has been shared between Amersham A Cappella, The Cheshire Chord Company and the White Rosettes, none of whom were competing this year.

The absence of the big three this year was a direct consequence of the affiliation agreement with the Barbershop Harmony Society that has allowed LABBS groups to compete that their International Convention. The White Rosettes made history as the first to represent LABBS on the international stage in 2025, and this July both Cheshire Chord Company and Amersham A Cappella were invited to participate.

I spent Saturday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella, revisiting their set from the European and BABS Conventions back in May in preparation for the World Mixed Chorus contest in Germany next Spring. By now they are deeply familiar with the music and their performance plans for it, and this presents the opportunity to do the kind of deep work that only becomes possible when you no longer have to focus on what you are doing and can direct your attention to the how.

Much of our work focused on listening techniques, finding ways to enhance everyone’s perception of what they were doing, since the first stage of refining your execution is increasing the acuity with which you hear the detail. Duetting inevitably played a part in this, with a lot of micro-adjustments making themselves through the process in addition to the explicit observations singers made as we walked through the process.

In my last post I shared some suggestions to help people develop the musicianship skills needed for singing on the off-beat. The second stage of the process is to consider the music that is asking you to deploy these skills and asking if the composer and/or arranger are facilitating your success or creating obstacles.

You see, off-beat passages are a classic example of the kind of thing a notation program can do really well, as it just produces a literal rendition untroubled by the sense-making that the human brain brings to the process of singing. And whilst sometimes (well, quite often) the problem is patchy musicianship skills in the performers, sometimes the problem is also over-optimism on the part of a writer who hasn’t spent enough of their life in rehearsal trying to help people with patchy skills achieve rhythmic security.

I left you last time with the following exercise, which reproduces the kind of thing you quite often see in a cappella arrangements, and turns out to offer a useful case study to explore this central musical question.