Barbershop Harmony

Barbershop Music    (Click here for a list of typical Barbershop songs)

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Barbershop harmony, as codified during the barbershop revival era (1940s-present), is a style of unaccompanied vocal music characterized by consonant four-part chords for every melody note in a predominantly homophonic texture. Each of the four parts has its own role: the lead sings the melody, with the tenor harmonizing above the melody, the bass singing the lowest harmonizing notes, and the baritone completing the chord. The melody is not sung by the tenor or bass, except for an infrequent note or two to avoid awkward voice leading, in tags or codas, or when some appropriate embellishing effect can be created. Occasional brief passages may be sung by fewer than four voice parts.

Barbershop music features songs with understandable lyrics and easily singable melodies, whose tones clearly define a tonal center and imply major and minor chords and barbershop (dominant and secondary dominant) seventh chords that resolve primarily around the circle of fifths, while making frequent use of other resolutions. What sets barbershop apart from other musical styles is the predominant use of the dominant-type seventh chords, which are however not true dominant seventh chords, but justly tuned otonal tetrads; where for example the voices are at frequencies in the proportion 4:5:6:7. Barbershop music also features a balanced, symmetrical form and a standard meter. The basic song and its harmonization are embellished by the arranger to provide appropriate support of the song's theme and to close the song effectively.

Barbershop singers adjust pitches to achieve perfectly tuned chords in just intonation while remaining true to the established tonal center. Artistic singing in the barbershop style exhibits a fullness or expansion of sound, precise intonation, a high degree of vocal skill, and a high level of unity and consistency within the ensemble. Ideally, these elements are natural, unmanufactured, and free from apparent effort.

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.

Slower barbershop songs often eschew a continuous beat, and notes are often held (or speeded up) ad libitum.

The voice parts in men's barbershop singing do not correspond closely to the correspondingly-named voice parts in classical music. Barbershop singing is performed both by men's and women's groups; the elements of the barbershop style and the names of the voice parts are the same for both.

Historical Origins

As a result of scholarship by Lynn Abbott and Dr. Jim Henry it is now generally accepted that barbershop singing originated in African-American communities in the U.S. around the turn of the century, where barbershops were, and remain today, social gathering places. The four-part harmony of the form has its roots in the black church, where close harmony has a long tradition.

The first uses of the term were associated with African-Americans. Henry notes that "The Mills Brothers learned to harmonize in their father's barber shop in Piqua, Ohio. Several other well-known black gospel quartets were founded in neighborhood barber shops, among them the New Orleans Humming Four, the Southern Stars and the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartette." [1]. Although the Mills Brothers are primarily known as jazz and pop artists and usually performed with instrumental accompaniment, the affinity of their harmonic style with that of the barbershop quartet is clearly in evidence in their music and most notably, perhaps, in their best-known gospel recording, "Jesus Met the Woman at the Well", performed a cappella. Their father founded a barbershop quartet, the Four Kings of Harmony, and the Mills Brothers produced at least three records in which they sang a cappella and performed traditional barbershop material.

• Abbott, Lynn. Play That Barber Shop Chord: A Case for the African American Origin of Barbershop Harmony. American Music 10 (1992) 289-325.

• Henry, James Earl. The Origins of Barbershop Harmony: A Study of Barbershop's Links to Other African American Musics as Evidenced through Recordings and Arrangements of Early Black and White Quartets. Ph.D diss., Washington University, 2000

Ringing chords

The defining characteristic of the barbershop style is the ringing chord. This is a name for one specific and well-defined acoustical effect, also referred to as expanded sound, the angel's voice, the fifth voice, or the overtone. (The barbershopper's "overtone" is not the same as the acoustic physicist's overtone).

The physics and psychophysics of the effect are fairly well understood; it occurs when the upper harmonics in the individual voice notes, and the sum and difference frequencies resulting from nonlinear combinations within the ear, reinforce each other at a particular frequency, strengthening it so that it stands out separately above the blended sound. The effect is audible only on certain kinds of chords and only when voices are rich in harmonics and very precisely tuned. It is not heard in chords sounded on keyboard instruments, due to the slight tuning imperfection of the even-tempered scale.

Gage Averill (2003) writes that "Barbershoppers have become partisans of this acoustic phenomenon" and that "the more experienced singers of the barbershop revival (at least after the 1940s) have self-consciously tuned their dominant seventh and tonic chords in just intonation to maximize the overlap of common overtones."

What is prized is not so much the "overtone" itself, but a unique sound whose achievement is most easily recognized by the presence of the "overtone." The precise synchronization of the waveforms of the four voices simultaneously creates the perception of a "fifth voice" while at the same time melding the four voices into a unified sound. The ringing chord is qualitatively different in sound from an ordinary musical chord e.g. as sounded on a keyboard instrument.

Most elements of the "revivalist" style are related to the desire to produce these ringing chords. Performance is a cappella to prevent the distracting introduction of even-tempered intonation, and because listening to anything but the other three voices interferes with a performer's ability to tune with the precision required. Barbershop arrangements stress chords and chord progressions that favor "ringing," at the expense of suspended and diminished chords and other harmonic vocabulary of the ragtime and jazz ages:

The dominant seventh-type chord... is so important to barbershop harmony that it is called the "barbershop seventh..." [SPEBSQSA (now BHS)] arrangers believe that a song should contain anywhere from 35 to 60 percent dominant seventh chords to sound "barbershop."

Historically barbershoppers used the word "minor chord" in a way that is confusing to those with musical training. Averill suggests that it was "a shorthand for chord types other than major triads," and says that the use of the word for "dominant seventh-type chords and diminished chords" was common in the late nineteenth century. A 1900 song called "Play That Barber-Shop Chord" (often cited as an early example of "barbershop" in reference to music) contains the lines

Cause Mister when you start that minor part

I feel your fingers slipping and a grasping at my heart,

Oh Lord play that Barber shop chord!

Averill notes the hints of rapture, "quasi-religion" and erotic passion in the language used by barbershoppers to describe the emotional effect. He quotes Jim Ewin as reporting "a tingling of the spine, the raising of the hairs on the back of the neck, the spontaneous arrival of 'goose flesh' on the forearm.... [the 'fifth note' has] almost mysterious propensities... It's the consummation devoutly wished by those of us who love Barbershop harmony. If you ask us to explain ... why we love it so, we are hard put to answer; that's there our faith takes over." Averill notes too the use of the language of addiction, "there's this great big chord that gets people hooked." An early manual was entitled "A Handbook for Adeline Addicts."

He notes too that "barbershoppers almost never speak of 'singing' a chord, but almost always draw on a discourse of physical work and exertion; thus, they 'hit,' 'chop,' 'ring,' 'crack,' and 'swipe....' ....vocal harmony... is interpreted as an embodied musicking. Barbershoppers never lose sight (or sound) of its physicality."