Spring '13 music endeavours

Recently I feel like I've been standing still and watching time speeding past. I'm now 20 and have finished my 2nd year of uni (only got the exams left :C). I feel irrevocably senile. However I did have a fantastic birthday which I celebrated over 3 days. My flatmates bought be so much food and alcohol, my uni friends were sweet and waited with me until midnight in the middle of Trafalgar Square in the freezing cold. They bought a hefty 3 layer velvet cake which I indulged lavishly in.

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All in all I have had a fun three months of 2013 so far, and would like to share with you some highlights. Unfortunately, I haven't been out and about as much as I'd liked due to the tenacious cold and gloom, and now it's already April aka time to buckle down and study 24/7. But this summer will be amazing, I'm in Shanghai for an internship and we're going to Seoul for a week (if there's no talks of war...) so I'll be somewhere hot for months :)

I've had an amazing experience with my Acapella group (The Houghtones) so far. We've braved the Lyceum Theatre (where the Lion King is held), and I was lucky enough to be given a solo. Standing on that stage was phenomenal, I've never seen so many pairs of eyes staring at my face. Thanks to that 30s of terror before I opened my mouth, now when I perform in front of an audience I don't get nervous anymore. I'm also grateful to my group for their amazing vocal backing plus all the hugs and confidence boosts they gave me backstage.

My 2nd encounter with my group is entering the Voice Festival UK 2013, an inter-university Acapella competition in which we were examined on performance, vocal ability, creativity, choreography and many other aspects including vocal percussion and soloist/backing harmonisation. It was a totally unforgettable experience, both the competition itself and also the preparation stage where all of us gave up so much time to get the entire 12min set together in around 2 weeks. The competition was also held at my old Sixth Form school, City of London School for Girls, and our rehearsal room was the room where I used to maths (which means I probably stayed there 90% of my day). Nostalgia undermines what I felt.

the score for one of our songs

serious face family portrait

We didn't win in the end as it's our first time ever entering, but the winners really did deserve their title. They are called 'Vive' and are from Guildhall School of Music and Drama. They most likely won for their originality plus very tight, dissonant harmonisations.

Vive:

I heard them for the first time at the London Acapella Festival 2013, and was impressed by their execution, especially at their blend and how they don't sing with their solo voices. They really listen out for each other and make sure that the others are heard, not only themselves. Since our group all come from a background of being soloists, we all agreed this is something we could work on.

They also remind me of a Korean jazz group called 'The Green Tea' who I discovered around 4/5 years ago:

There were people from BBC and Channel 4 who came and filmed us rehearsing, and carried out a few interviews. We also received some positive feedback:

"The Houghtones of LSE were the third group to take to the stage, and they opened with a fantastically original idea. The theme of radio jingles cleverly ran through their first number. They opened with the BBC Radio 2 jingle, segueing into Queen’s Radio Gaga, Ignition (Remix), and even Beethoven’s fifth symphony combined with When I Get You Alone, Robin Thicke number based on a sample of A Fifth of Beethoven by Walter Murphy, before ending on the ‘This Is Heart’ jingle. In that fantastic introduction – complete with a William and Kate parody – they established themselves as having a fantastic sense of humour, great stage presence, and fantastic, simple, but extremely effective arrangements. They clearly enjoy a good medley and so I was already sold, but then their next number, an arrangement of Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water that borrowed elements of Aretha Franklin’s version of the song, really brought the good stuff, combining a brilliant soloist with an arrangement that was both subtle, pretty, powerful and full on. Their set culminated in a mash-up of We Are Young by fun. and Take A Walk by Passion Pit. This is definitely a group to look out for." - UACUK

On March 13th I went with Frankie to see the BBC Singers singing some Baroque works by Lotti, Scarlatti and MacMillan. It was a great way to relax and take a break from end of term deadlines. I'm not religious, but after this concert I understood why people go to church to pray and self reflect. We sat in the front row and the voices of the singers reached as directly, to the degree where we could hear their enunciation+vibrato as clear as glass. The music is both overpowering and introspective. It was hard to not be at complete peace. We were treated to an excellent repertoire of both 16th century classics of the Passion of Christ and also contemporary works by Macmillan, which had the iconic Baroque style, but was given a more clashing, political edge. 

Around 3 weeks ago whilst I was skimming Facebook I saw a post by piano legend/master Valentina Lisitsa saying that she was going to hold a free concert playing on an old public piano at St Pancras International Station. It was obviously unmissable since her normal concert tickets are sky high in prices, so I waited for her in the freezing cold. It turned out she kept her promise and played for us a first class set, including Beethoven's Appassionata in full, Liszt's La Campanella and Tottentanz, Rachmaninoff Prelude No.5, Chopin Nocturne No.2, Ave Maria and many more pieces by Rachman. I was impressed how her fingers could move so fast on that crappy upright piano under such cold temperatures, and how she kept on playing without talking much for a good 1 and a half hours. 

Me and the legend!

Rachmaninoff Prelude No.5 In G Minor, Op.23

To end off with some modern day music, I went to see Beach House with some uni friends. I really have no words to describe how incredible Victoria's voice was. It was hauntingly elegant, sultry and heavy but liberating at the same time. She had an amazing range for a female voice and was not scared to deliver with volume, which was very refreshing for singers of her genre, who often sing with a raspy, airy tone. I was hugely impressed also by the stage lighting, which changed with the music and added more impact to certain parts of the music. They did a super long set playing their new album Bloom entirely and also many old songs. Before seeing this live I honestly quite disliked Bloom because the entire tracklist sounded like they all came from one sample. But the band was very conscious of the beginning and endings of their songs, which in the end seemed like a 2 hour long track. They definitely lived up to my standards and we all left evidently yearning for more.

Victoria did however say that they won't be playing again in London for a very very long time, and when we all laughed in disbelief she told us it was no bullshit. I have no idea what they have in plan but that made me very sad :(

Myth

That's it for now! I'll be getting a new haircut this week similar to my one of my favourite Chinese actress Sun Li's

so hope you look forward to my future updates :) I also want to do a wishlist post on a few fashion items to let you guys know the trends I'm into right now, but I'll probably do that after I have my haircut so I can upload some nice photos of me haha

I'll end this post musically with 3 songs I'm madly in love with right now! x

Mindy Gledhill - Anchor

Blondfire - Walking With Giants

The Shins - Australia

Good luck with revision to all of you, I'll be working hard too :D
Can't wait for the summer!!

The Art of Acapella

Around November last year I auditioned for and joined my uni's Acapella group. We get together twice a week to sing a wide repertoire of songs (just not choral/classical). Most of the time we sing old classics like Bon Iver and Simon & Garfunkel. Yesterday our Acapella group took part in the London Acapella Festival from 10am-7pm, and intensively participated in workshops designed to better our vocal skills. There is no way anyway can give you a satisfactory set of tips to better your voice in hour long sessions when they have no idea what kind of voice you have, but they did provide us a good summary.

There was one workshop on music arrangement which I found particularly inspiring. The speaker was Christopher Diaz of the podcast Mouth Off, who gave us a very refreshing approach to music arranging. Rather than thinking of scores and notes etc, he advised us to arrange based on feelings. Depending on where we are, what we are feeling prior to writing, what we FEEL like getting out of the original track, we will all produce very different interpretations.

For anyone wanting to do arranging, a basic understanding of music theory is crucial. This automatically implies that the main difference of what makes a good arrangement and a rubbish one does not lie in how deep your knowledge of chordal progressions and triads are, but of how capable you are of delivering a feeling. I'm pretty sure I have written on this very blog in the past that music is an art form, and if it evokes your senses, then it is a successful piece of art. And there was Diaz on the stage, saying exactly what I believed in. He told us, who cares what methods you used to arrange the track. At the end of the day if your listeners like what you did, you did well and your method was a good one.

His particular method was listening to the song over and over, and jotting down the main lyrics/bass lines he wants to pick out from the original. From there he would think about the lifespan of the song, ie techniques the singer could use to bring out the places that need accentuating. When I heard this it really rang a bell because when I make remixes, this is exactly the way I go about doing it. I listen to the original track and pick out bits I want to expand on and bits I want to give a different feel to. In our acapella rehearsals we sing to each other and work out the best ways to deliver the songs together. Everything is trial and error, but at the end, it always works out.

In the talk he also emphasised the importance of singers singing together in acapella groups. Not just singing together but a real tacit understanding of each other, where we know when to start and stop singing just by looking at each other, when to control our vocal projection to compliment the others' voices. There's a lot of science behind singing in unison, for example on average a person's breath lasts around the same time, and so if we sing a note, naturally the dynamics will vary the same way for different people, and when we sing together we should sense when we are all going to finish that note, even without looking at each other.

I first knew about acapella through DBSK when I was around 14, I was just blown away by their acapella version of Whatever They Say:

I was so impressed by how they enunciated the words in exactly the same way, making sure their dictation emphasised the same words with the same level of impact. It's clear that their vocal bond does not only come from practising together, but years of living and understanding each other to know how to sing as a group, and not as a soloist. I watched interviews of them discussing each others' voices, and at the time I didn't think much but now I am even more impressed how much each member knows about the other members voices. From my experience singing with others it's not easy to give all rounded judgments on what you know about voices that are not yours.

Acapella singing is to me the most natural art form. Every person is born with a voice, and fron the moment we were born we used that voice. Possibilities are limitless and you could do so many wonderful things with it. People began singing together ever since civilisation began, and now we have perfected the craft so well it's created the world of Acapella. Some groups blow our minds with technique, eg pretending to be musical instruments as Cluster did in their version of Jingle Bells:

Nothing from what you just heard was made by an actual instrument. It is 100% entirely vocals.

While this sort of thing is amazing, I still think real talent of a group lies in the unison of their voices. When you hear a collective voice that rise and fall together as one, whose singers speak and breathe together down to the last syllabic detail, you can tell straight away whether the singers understand each other well. Whilst it's important to pick singers whose voices SOUND well together, it is ever more crucial to make sure the singers BLEND well together. Successful groups will know how to fit in with each others voices instinctively, and the sound they create is just sensational.

Listen to the way they begin and end the notes so precisely in unison. It feels like one person is singing the song.

After the long day we all chatted for ages and talked about new ways to rehearse. In some ways I'm glad we are becoming so comfortable with each other. I think it's the only way we can understand each other's singing voices: by understanding each other first.