It includes turn-of-the-century Americana melodies, the Tin Pan Alley oeuvre, and jazz standards. Barbershop is a rewarding genre of music that is accessible for beginning students, but can also provide a enjoyable challenge for accomplished singers, notwithstanding the combination of voice parts in your vocal groups.
Barbershop singing emphasizes proper vocal technique; in fact, there is no barbershop-specific singing technique. Good singing is good singing, and barbershop asks for that. Barbershop can help you build strong musicians.
It teaches ear training, sight singing, harmonization, and ensemble skills like balance and tuning. Try teaching a tag during your classroom warm-ups. A tag is the term used in jazz and barbershop that means the coda of a song; it typically is just a few measures and has a flourish of chord changes. The lead sings with limited vibrato to add color and warmth to the sound. The lead is responsible for conveying the interpretation, emotion and inflections of the song. On the rarer occasions when the melody line is in another part, which may be only for a few notes, the lead will need to be aware to lighten her vocal quality to allow the melody to shine wherever it is being sung.
If you are in a quartet, the others will follow your lead. In a chorus, we all follow the director. The voice part is similar to the equivalent of an Alto I except that baritone harmony notes cross the lead notes.
Primarily sung below the lead but sometimes sung above, depending on where the melody is situated, baritones must constantly adjust their balance to accommodate their position in the chord. They must have a good ear. BASS is the lowest note in the barbershop chord. Singers should have a rich, mellow voice and generally sing the root and fifth of each chord.
The bass sings a relatively straight, well-produced tone with a minimum of vibrato. The range is comparable to that of a contralto or Alto II in traditional choral music. The range is from E-flat below middle C to G above middle C. Similar to the baritone, this part is written in the bass clef an octave lower than it is actually sung. Our top voices sing with less weight and intensity than our lower voices.
Circle of fifths is a visual representation of the relationships among the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, their corresponding key signatures and associated major and minor keys.
Barbershop music also features a balanced and symmetrical form, and standard meter. Barbershop musical arrangements exhibit harmonization which is embellished to support the song's theme and to close the song effectively.
The presentation of Barbershop music uses appropriate musical and visual methods to convey the theme of the song and provide the audience with an emotionally satisfying and entertaining experience. The musical and visual delivery is from the heart, believable, and sensitive to the song and its arrangement throughout. The most stylistic presentation artistically melds together the musical and visual aspects to create and sustain the illusions suggested by the music.
Skip to main content. Home About. What is barbershop harmony? Brief history of Barbershop harmony In the last half of the 19th century, African American barbershops in the United States often served double duty as community centers for their clientele. Characteristics of the Barbershop style Barbershop harmony is characterized by consonant four-part chords for each melody note in a homophonic structure.
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