Barbershop Without Apologies And Not At All Kew-el

I LIKE A LITTLE barbershop quartet now and again,  some of it is very good and clever and a lot of it is fun.   It's more music for singing and doing than it is music to make a career out of.   I do respect the barbershop communities, some of the most dedicated and serious practitioners of group and community  singing in the world.   Their exploration and knowledge of some rather specialized aspects of tonal harmony and practice is as remarkable as that of the medieval music quartet Anonymous 4 and a few other such groups.   Some of the newer quartets are extending the traditions and practices in interesting ways just as jazz musicians have extended the same traditions, going back in recorded music to the ragtime era.   Here's an example from Scott Joplin's Treemonisha:

Lots of the best jazz musicians, especially from the early years participated in quartet singing of the kind that would be called "barbershop" after 1910 when one of the big hits of that year named it.   

That's Bert Williams who first broke a show-biz color barrier by singing that in the 1910 Ziegfield Follies.   Interesting to me is the idiosyncratic identification of barbershop harmony as a "minor chord" when what's called that in barbershop language is an inversion of major dominant seventh with the diminished fifth in a more noticeable position.   That kind of language differing from classical theory in the culture of barbershop . . . well, it's interesting to me and a sign of a vital alternative musical practice.

I think if I'd found three other guys to form a quartet when I was in high school or college and we composed and arranged our own material it would have done me a lot better than any of the "theory" classes I took.   I think I'll recommend that to a kid I know who's talking about majoring in music in three years.   I'll suggest that they go farther than the dominant seventh harmony, though there's nothing but musical good that would come from gaining the level of familiarity with it that practicing barbershop harmony would bring. It would get him a lot more than that usual garage band bull shit would. 

That's enough music major geekery for one weekend, I guess.