Powerful Voices: The Musical and Social World of Collegiate A Cappella

Introduction

Introduction Sometimes it seems like one can visit any American college or university and collegiate a cappella groups are easy to ‹nd. In fact, a campus visit may not even be necessary, since many groups sing at community venues, travel the country on tour, upload their latest clips to YouTube, and even appear on the occasional television show. As self-directed ensembles of student singers, they arrange, perform, and record a repertory that draws heavily from pop/rock songs of the latter-twentieth and early-twenty-‹rst centuries (though one hears the occasional jazz standard, Broadway show tune, novelty song, or non-Western piece), and they do so without instruments. Music faculties treat them variously as a good old college tradition, a mere curiosity, or a musical and curricular distraction. College singing dates back at least to the ‹fteenth century at Oxford and Cambridge in England, and to the colonial era in the New World, but collegiate a cappella saw increased participation and growth in the twentieth century, most explosively in the 1980s and 1990s. A cappella groups usually consist of eight to sixteen singers and come in men’s, women’s, and mixed varieties. They are usually extracurricular activities; with few exceptions, students do not receive academic credit for their participation, and faculty leadership is nonexistent . Singing is as much a social activity as it is a musical pursuit, but most groups treat their musical efforts with some degree of seriousness. A cappella is Italian for “in the style of the chapel” and today describes vocal music sung without instrumental accompaniment. In its broadest sense, it can describe genres from Gregorian chant (plainchant) to South African Zulu choral pieces to Islamic Koranic recitation to some Western choral works, bar- bershop quartets, doo-wop groups, and the ensembles examined here. I use the term collegiate (or college) to distinguish collegiate a cappella from other and earlier “classical,” “light-classical,” sacred, or vernacular a cappella choral genres . (Throughout this book, the term a cappella in a normal roman typeface indicates collegiate a cappella as a musical genre, practice, and community, while a cappella in italics indicates a more general sense of unaccompanied singing.) The term collegiate also separates collegiate a cappella groups from professional ones, which share a similar repertory but tend to be smaller in size, pay their members directly, travel more widely, and perform more frequently. Collegiate a cappella involves a signi‹cant number of people, as recent estimates place the number of a cappella groups in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom at around twelve hundred.1 Meanwhile, for years the genre has received press coverage in major media outlets. Singing a cappella is a musical technique that has been around for millennia , but collegiate a cappella may be distinguished musically by its repertory and the way it is translated into the voices-only medium. Vocal parts are conceived instrumentally. Emulation is balanced with originality as groups strive to sound like a song’s original recording while offering their own interpretation of it. Recordings sometimes employ the technological tools of professional recording studios to create an idealized performance or alter vocal sounds to seem as close to a song’s original recording as possible. Socially, a cappella groups tend to be tight-knit ensembles in which close interpersonal relationships are formed. They are what Mark Slobin calls “af‹nity groups,” “charmed circles of like-minded music-makers drawn magnetically to a certain genre that creates strong expressive bonding.”2 Most spend far more time rehearsing than giving live performances, and rehearsals are a site of socialization and the negotiation of a group’s musical and social identity, a “microcosm of an idealized social system.”3 More broadly, a national (indeed, international) network has emerged through which individuals and groups encounter one another and share musical ideas through joint concerts, tours, competitions, recordings, and the Internet. An a cappella community can thus be found within any particular a cappella group, on any campus that includes a cappella groups among its student organizations, and can be felt by those who participate in this wider a cappella scene. Culturally, a cappella enables young men and women to join together and share experience as they pass through the liminal space and time known as college , a delicate period during which identities are (re)formed on the path from 2 powerful voices adolescence toward adulthood. Singers offer each other...