Barbershop (and recent concept question)

I'd like to say that Barbershop is some of my favorite music. I am quite
serious about this; it does everything that I expect good music to do. I'm
writing because it so often doesn't get taken seriously.

Barbershop combines the calming and beneficial qualities of beatless tuning
with the intellectual rush of western polyphony. It combines the enhanced
musical bandwidth of the 7-limit with all the desirable properties of the
diatonic scale, and to some extent with the 12-tone Pythagorean MOS. Being
jazz, it has plenty of good rhythms and exotic harmonic movement. Being
choral music, it often has lyrics. Being four-part, it is flexible to
write for and a joy to listen to (as a composer, I find 4-part writing
perhaps my favorite). As a singer, I find the barbershop technique a
fulfillment of the vocal medium. And as Erv Wilson and I once agreed,
there is hardly a sound more desirable than the sound of the human voice.

It is the concept of Barbershop that I think often throws people off. And
it is concept-rich. In fact, it achieves for me greater power of concept
than any "conceptualist" music I know of. And a better concept I could not
ask for. I tend to look at barbershop tunes as 20th century madrigals.
They offer a unique view at the roots of Jazz. They are often surprisingly
sexually explicit, but in a completely wholesome way. It's so refreshing
to find music so benevolent.

Participating in Barbershop has been a whole lot of fun. Nothing has been
better for my ear, or my voice. And you get to meet these sweet guys,
married for 50 years and with big white curly mustaches. These guys are real!

Carl

At 11:20 AM 1/9/99 -0500, Carl Lumma wrote:

>Barbershop combines the calming and beneficial qualities of beatless tuning
>with the intellectual rush of western polyphony.

>Being four-part, it is flexible to
>write for and a joy to listen to (as a composer, I find 4-part writing
>perhaps my favorite).

Have there been compositions for Barbershop quintet, or do the Beach Boys
hold a patent on 5-part vocal harmony?

--Charlie Jordan <http://www.rev.net/~aloe/music>