The British Barbershopper

Barbershop singing is a distinctive and under-documented facet of Britain's musical landscape. Imported from the USA in the 1960s, it has developed into an active and highly organized musical community characterized by strong social support structures and a proselytizing passion for its particular style. This style is defined, within the community, in largely music-theoretical terms and is both highly prescriptive and continually contested, but there is also a host of performance traditions that articulate barbershop's identity as a distinct and specific genre. Liz Garnett documents and analyses the social and musical practices of this specialized community of music-makers, and extends this analysis to theorize the relationship between music and self-identity. The book engages with a range of sociological and musicological theoretical frameworks in order to explore the role of harmony, ritual, sexual politics, performance styles and 'tag-singing' in barbershop. This analysis shows how musical style and cultural discourses can be seen to interact in the formation of identity. Garnett provides the first in-depth scholarly insight into the British barbershop community, and contributes to ongoing debates in the semiotics and the sociology of music.

Barbershop singing is a distinctive and under-documented facet of Britain's musical landscape. Imported from the USA in the 1960s, it has developed into an active and highly organized musical community characterized by strong social support structures and a proselytizing passion for its particular style. This style is defined, within the community, in largely music-theoretical terms and is both highly prescriptive and continually contested, but there is also a host of performance traditions that articulate barbershop's identity as a distinct and specific genre. Liz Garnett documents and analyses the social and musical practices of this specialized community of music-makers, and extends this analysis to theorize the relationship between music and self-identity. The book engages with a range of sociological and musicological theoretical frameworks in order to explore the role of harmony, ritual, sexual politics, performance styles and 'tag-singing' in barbershop. This analysis shows how musical style and cultural discourses can be seen to interact in the formation of identity. Garnett provides the first in-depth scholarly insight into the British barbershop community, and contributes to ongoing debates in the semiotics and the sociology of music.

In SoYou Want to Sing Barbershop, veteran barbershoppers Billy J. Biffle of the Barbershop Harmony Society and Diane M. Clark of Sweet Adelines International provide a practical handbook for singers at all levels who want to learn about the American art form known as barbershop singing. Clark and Biffle explore the history of the style, survey the international organizational structure of the twenty-first century barbershop world, and outline techniques to develop the necessary vocal skills for the style. Guest authors Scott McCoy and Wendy LeBorgne provide valuable information on vocal anatomy and vocal health. The So You Want to Sing series is produced in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Like all books in the series, So You Want to Sing Barbershop features online supplemental material on the NATS website. Please visit www.nats.org to access style-specific exercises, audio and video files, and additional resources.

It is a truism in teaching choral conducting that the director should look like s/he wishes the choir to sound. The conductor's physical demeanour has a direct effect on how the choir sings, at a level that is largely unconscious and involuntary. It is also a matter of simple observation that different choral traditions exhibit not only different styles of vocal production and delivery, but also different gestural vocabularies which are shared not only between conductors within that tradition, but also with the singers. It is as possible to distinguish a gospel choir from a barbershop chorus or a cathedral choir by visual cues alone as it is simply by listening. But how can these forms of physical communication be explained? Do they belong to a pre-cultural realm of primate social bonding, or do they rely on the context and conventions of a particular choral culture? Is body language an inherent part of musical performance styles, or does it come afterwards, in response to music? At a practical level, to what extent can a practitioner from one tradition mandate an approach as 'good practice', and to what extent can another refuse it on the grounds that 'we don't do it that way'? This book explores these questions at both theoretical and practical levels. It examines textual and ethnographic sources, and draws on theories from critical musicology and nonverbal communication studies to analyse them. By comparing a variety of choral traditions, it investigates the extent to which the connections between conductor demeanour and choral sound operate at a general level, and in what ways they are constructed within a specific idiom. Its findings will be of interest both to those engaged in the study of music as a cultural practice, and to practitioners involved in a choral conducting context that increasingly demands fluency in a variety of styles.

Caroline Bithell explores the history and significance of the natural voice movement and its culture of open-access community choirs, weekend workshops, and summer camps. Founded on the premise that 'everyone can sing', the movement is distinguished from other choral movements by its emphasis on oral transmission and its eclectic repertoire of songs from across the globe.

Who are pop dandies? Why are stars like David Bowie, Jarvis Cocker, Pete Doherty and Robbie Williams so dandified? Taking up a wide range of British pop stars, Hawkins seeks to find out why so many have cast themselves in roles that often take style to absurd extremes. In this study, male pop artists are mapped against a cultural and historical background through a genealogy of personalities, such as Oscar Wilde, W.H. Auden, Andy Warhol, No?Coward, Derek Jarmen, David Beckham and countless others. A critical analysis of issues and approaches to musical performance through masculinity becomes the focal point of this fascinating study. Ranging from the sixties to beyond the twentieth century, The British Pop Dandy considers the construction of the male pop icon through the spectacle of videos, live concerts and films. Why do we derive pleasure from the performing body, and how is entertainment linked to categories of gender and sexuality? The author insists that pop performances can be understood through human characteristics that relate to the particulars of dandyism, camp and glamour, and this he theorizes through the work of Charles Baudelaire. One of the political objectives of the dandy is to liberate himself through a denial of the structures that assume fixed identity. Not least, it is acts of queering in pop music that characterize entire generations of male artists in the UK. Setting out to discover what distinguishes the British pop dandy, Hawkins considers the role of music and performance in the articulation of hyperbolic display. It is argued that the recorded voice is a construction that idealizes self-representation, and absorbs the listener's attention. Particularly, camp address in singing practice is taken up in conjunction with a discussion of intimacy, which forms part of the strategy of the performer. In a range of songs and videos selected for music analysis, Hawkins points to the uniqueness of the voice as it expresses a transgressive quali

The first scholarly account of the music and culture of collegiate a cappella

The present boom in popular history is not unprecedented. The contributions to this volume investigate peaks of historical interest which favour popular approaches from around 1800 to the present. They analyse the media, genres and institutions through which historical knowledge has been disseminated - from artefacts to the archive, from poetry to photography, from music to murals, and from periodicals to popular TV series. They ask how major traditions in the popular imagery of the past have evolved and changed over time. Cultural contexts covered in the book include Western and Southern Europe, the United States and West Africa. Contributors come from a range of disciplines, including history, literary and cultural studies, musicology as well as social and cultural anthropology.