The Fredösphere

Ian Moss has a new blog, with an emphasis on arts management to go along with the composing.

Dark Roasted Blend has one of its gallaries of gorgeous retro-future art.  This time the subject is cities.  (Hat tip Gravity Lens.)

I've been looking for a good video of the Four Bettys for a while now.  I found one with them singing "So Happy Together," but they really deserve something with better sound quality.  Meanwhile, enjoy.  Female barbershop quartets use a two-staff system with treble clef on the top for the tenor and lead and bass clef (transposed up an octave) for the baritone and bass.  This way, arrangements for men's groups can be adopted effortlessly by women's groups, and vice versa.  One more factoid:  as best I can tell, the term "beauty shop quartet" has become moribund; perhaps stillborn is the better metaphor.  One is inclined to be impressed by the female bass (really, a female with something like the range of a male tenor) but don't overlook the difficulty of singing the soprano part, which can get very high, but must always stay under the lead in terms of volume.  Unlike with men's groups, there's no falsetto to solve that problem.

Labels: BarbershopHarmony, Composer, Futurism

The Church of the Holy Cross must be in a rough neighborhood, since its signage exhorts visitors to eschew nudity and weapons.  Well, no, it's not in a neighborhood; it's in Second Life.

Meanwhile, aworks noticed that Pandora now supports classical music.

Last Saturday, my ad hoc quartet sang a set of barbershop classics and "My Antonia," my new barbershop composition.  (Hopefully to become a contestable barbershop composition.)  I don't recall having more truly mixed feelings from a performance experience, although I'd give it an overall highly positive rating.  My unhappiness stems from my attempts to get the group organized and rehearsing early, which were frustrated in multiple ways.  In the end, we had to scramble around, recruiting a student from U-M (John Hummel is his name) and over-rehearsing the last few days, which wore out some of the voices.  My voice was one of the casualties, partly because I was experimenting with the high tenor part performed in my falsetto.  Is my falsetto technique fundamentally flawed, or did I simply try for more volume than was reasonable?  I'm not sure, but I'm told barbershop tenors frequently resort to falsetto, so somebody must know how to make it work.

It will take me a while to rework "My Antonia" and get it recorded, but you'll hear it here eventually, I promise.  Meanwhile, hear Max Q sing "You Can Fly."  The sound quality is marginal, but the tag ending is crazily ornamental even by the standards of the genre.

Labels: BarbershopHarmony

A recent visitor mentioned two barbershop quartets:

Realtime.  I love those black velvet jackets, but I bet it's a nightmare getting the hair clippings off them after a long day's work behind the barber's chair.  The group sneaks in a few quasi-legitimate sixth chords, and the baritone displays fine control of the all-important single-eyebrow waggle during his closeup.  This performance shows why they crush the competition, and the velvet.



Nightlife.  Here they sing "One Moment in Time," a oddly beautiful meditation on the metaphysics of temporal existence, the  persistence of subjective perception, and the politics of meaning.  I think.  I do know it ain't "Coney Island Baby."

Labels: BarbershopHarmony, VideoClip

Wow.  Just what I needed.  Go see barbershop quartet arranger David Wright's presentation on the topic of barbershop style.  It's packed with tantalizing snippets of great vocal harmonizing, with great examples from old-tyme groups such as the Flat Foot Four.  It also offers a peek at the internal debate raging within the Barbershop Harmony organization on what music may be "contestable," i.e., allowed to be sung in official barbershop singing contests.

Don't read the text first; go straight to the video, so as to hear the musical examples referenced.  The photos in sepia tones of quartets from decades past are priceless.  Consult this barbershop dictionary if you don't know the lingo.

Wright is a liberal (ahem!) who argues for the use of tight sixths and other influences from jazz and blues.  His examples show these chords' presence in barbershop harmony for decades.  Apparently, "reforms" during the 1970s severely limited what embellishments and polyphonic effects could be used in official competitions, resulting in many classic barbershop arrangements being marginalized in the movement they helped define.

Best line:  "Note the long sequence of chords, exaggerated even more by the performance, clearly sung for the pure enjoyment of barbershop harmony. Is it indulgent? Some might say so.  Is it a part of the barbershop style? Most definitely."

Labels: BarbershopHarmony

Let's continue a little longer with our barbershop quartet theme.  First, theory geeks can enjoy an old discussion over at Kyle Gann's place on barbershop's unanalyzable Chord Of Mystery.  My opinion, if I dared express it, is that the chord defies functional analysis because it has no function.  It ain't right.

Meanwhile, enjoy this performance by a barbershop quartet that would be my favorite even if they didn't have the coolest name possible:  Derf.  Or Ferd.  Or something; I forget.

Labels: BarbershopHarmony, VideoClip

I spent last evening rehearsing with a local barbershop chorus.  I have a few thoughts.

It is very good for a conductor to spend time on the other side of the baton.

Barbershop is a world that intersects but slightly with the church music world, and even more slightly with the high-brow choral world.  It has a blue-collar vibe that is startling.  When the local director wants his singers to sit down, he yells "sit dooooown!"  The church ladies' perms would curdle if a choir director talked that way to them.

Barbershop groups tend to be somewhat flexible stylistically when they perform, but they are not given that latitude when they compete.  The Barbershop Harmony Society defines what music is "contestable."  I have heard rumors of barbershop's reputation for stylistic conservatism; it is a topic discussed in whispers, usually in seedy bars in third-world seaports.  It is one thing to hear the rumors; it is quite another thing to sit down with the official BHS Contest and Judging Handbook and read its rather (!) detailed, über-geeky rules for chord use:

The dominant ninth chord is used primarily when it is implied by the melody and the melody lies on the ninth.  Occasionally, the ninth may appear in another voice to create a pleasing duet or to create natural voice leading.  Only the root or fifth may be omitted, usually the root.  Use of a chord with the fifth omitted must be justified by a valid musical reason.  If the root is present, it must be voiced more than an octave below the ninth.

They also disallow instruments of any kind.  Looks like a plan to introduce an airplane propeller into my next barbershop composition is a non-starter.

Which brings me to the next point.  You know my agenda is to write music for these guys.  "But Fred," you scream hysterically, "those rules!  They'll stifle your artistic expression!"  We roll our eyes at the rules because personal expression is a Myth that dominates our modern understanding of art.  Then we reconsider, reminding ourselves that constraints often stimulate creativity:  think Rachmaninoff's Vespers.  The truth is that art struggles in environments that are too permissive, but also, in environments that are too restrictive.  There's a region of magical twilight where just enough resistence leads to just the right kind of struggle that results in a satisfying work of art.  That finding that region is difficult is only one more way that Art Is Hard.

I'm going to try writing a contestable barbershop composition.  I won't spend all my time in the barbershop world, but I'm going to enjoy it while I'm there.  I will wallow in lush harmonies and indulge my wildest passing-tone cravings.  One does not fill one's bathtub with chocolate pudding every day, but one does it once in a while, right?  (You do do that, right?  Hello?  Anyone?)

Frankly, I completely get the reason these rules were developed.  Novelty grants a short-term advantage but causes mission creep over the long-term.  These guys want a contest of barbershop music, and they don't want their contest spoiled because some jerks perform a "barbershop rap" or some other abomination that brings the house down and wins the trophy.  (A bronzed shaving brush, no doubt.)  Coney Island Baby:  yes.  Phoney Island Baby:  definitely not.  It's in the nature of things that, over the years, BHS judges were forced to define what barbershop means, in ever more legalistic terms.

If you read the rules carefully, you'll find they include escape clauses.  A little of the vermouth of dissonance is allowed, as long as the important chords deliver lots of the gin of dominant and tonic.  I'll look for subtle ways to subvert their paradigm.  If I'm lucky, I'll subvert it and make them like it.

Labels: BarbershopHarmony, Choral, Composition