What is it with the Eighties?

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Wednesday 2nd September 2026
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I had a holiday this summer on the Isle of Wight that was blissfully relaxing except for the relentlessness consistency of the playlists. Whether it was in pubs, cafés and restaurants, at tourist attractions, in the live sets performed twice a week down the road from our holiday let, blasting out of open car windows, or through Bluetooth speakers on the beach, the vast majority of the songs were from the late seventies or eighties, interspersed with the occasional sixties tune. Even when we found an ice cream parlour by the beach that had a much more current sound world, about half the tunes in their playlist were covers or remixes of 80s tunes.

Now, I was an eighties kid, and I like a lot of this music, but it turns out that if that’s all I hear for three weeks, I start to get a bit stir crazy. I have been listening to a lot of jazz and classical music since I got home to cleanse my aural palate, and hope I will be able to re-engage with the era again in due course once I have recovered from the overindulgence.

Sad News

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Monday 17th August 2026
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It is with sadness and regret that I announce my resignation as the MD of Rainbow Voices. I had much rewarding music-making with the choir, and have come to feel deeply fond of many of the lovely singers I have had the privilege to work with there.

Gaming the Learning Process with Tone Rangers

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Monday 20th July 2026
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tonerangersjuly26

I spent a happy afternoon on Wednesday with a quartet called the Tone Rangers. They are experienced performers, having been together for quite a few years, and whilst they don’t participate in the national barbershop contest scene, they enjoy competing in local festivals to give themselves a challenge. They arrived with some specific musical-problem solving to do, and we interspersed this with exploring a number of other areas of vocal development and musical detail.

The specific problem-solving related to the rhythm in a particular passage in one of their songs. And in addressing it we thought quite a lot about not just what needed to happen with the rhythm, but what needed to happen in their brains to get the results of our problem-solving secure. Because the thing about tricky passages is that you spend a good deal of time on them, which can result in the unsuccessful way of doing them getting very well-practised in. The challenge is therefore not just in learning the new way of doing things, but in forgetting the old way.

Lenticular Vision: A Case Study

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 9th July 2026
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Some years I ago I wrote about a concept developed in Tara McPherson’s book Reconstructing Dixie: lenticular vision. It is a metaphor derived from the visual arts, and she deploys it to articulate the way that from the 1950s onwards the white-supremacist cultural systems of the American South increasingly hid the extent to which they were built on the oppression of Black people.

In a world where the Civil Rights movement meant that the open depiction of racial hierarchies was becoming subject to critique, the White response was often the erasure of African Americans. This created a fiction that the remaining cultural patterns ‘just happened’ to be White, rather than having been built by violence, segregation, and the appropriation of labour.

I have been thinking about this again recently in the context of a specific song which I was asked to arrange: ‘Moses’ from Singin’ in the Rain. In the movie, it is a tap-dancing extravanganza that emerges out of the mockery of a fusty old acting teacher, and the social world it inhabits is entirely Caucasian.

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