The Sounds of Gender: Textualizing Barbershop Performance

Abstract

Were one to compare a contemporary barbershop performance to a score of the same song, one might be surprised at the differences. Rather than rendering a score exactly as a composer or arranger indicates, most barbershoppers create their own “interpretations,” or understandings of what the song means, and use these to alter the rhythms, tempi, and notes of the written page. Instead of a gold standard, the barbershop score provides a starting place or guide for quartets and choruses, which have the final artistic authority over their performance. This tradition of song interpretation in modern barbershop singing emerged alongside much of the barbershop musical repertory in dialogue with the sheet music, vaudeville, and recording industries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a conversation that can still be heard today; as other studies have demonstrated, contemporary barbershop organizations and praxis continue to reflect the gender, race, and class discourses of the Victorian era (Averill, Four parts, no waiting: A social history of American Barbershop harmony. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003; Mook, Journal of the Society for American Music, 1, 453–483, 2007; Garnett, The British Barbershopper: A study in socio-musical values. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2005). However, when confronting practical matters of song interpretation, barbershoppers must also negotiate contemporary discourses of race, gender, class, age, and genre. They debate, for example, how to imagine the bourgeois, female object of a song’s lyrics, how young or old should they imagine themselves to be when performing, and whether certain styles of black music can fit within their genre. While referencing the history of barbershop singing, these internal debates also link the genre with its current social and cultural contexts, and empower barbershop performers to create meaning.