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1. From Nineteenth-Century Glee Clubs to Barbershop Harmony
- University of Michigan Press
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chapter 1 From Nineteenth-Century Glee Clubs to Barbershop Harmony It might be tempting to look at recent pop culture and conclude that collegiate a cappella suddenly came out of nowhere. Or in 2009, to be exact. In its eighth season that year, the hit television show American Idol featured Anoop Desai, a member of the Clef Hangers, a men’s a cappella group from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In April, piano-pop singer-songwriter Ben Folds released Ben Folds Presents: University A Cappella!, an album consisting entirely of a cappella renditions of his own compositions, with fourteen of the album’s sixteen tracks recorded by collegiate groups.1 After broadcasting the premier episode in May, the Fox television network aired the ‹rst season of its series, Glee, about a high school glee club; the second season featured the Warblers, an a cappella group from a rival school whose voices were provided by a collegiate group, the Tufts University Beelzebubs. And in December, NBC aired a fourepisode singing contest featuring a cappella groups (three of which were current or former collegiate groups) entitled The Sing-Off, which was quickly renewed for additional seasons. In a newspaper article covering the competition, the president of the University of Virginia Hullabahoos, a men’s group, is quoted saying, “[A] cappella was kind of dormant. Then, all of sudden, it’s something everyone knows about.”2 Collegiate a cappella did not suddenly appear in the early twenty-‹rst century , however; it merely caught a good dose of the media spotlight. Instead, student vocal groups have been a central part of American college life since its inception .Although men and women have been singing without accompaniment 11 for millennia, the roots of contemporary collegiate a cappella lay in three places: nineteenth-century choral singing on American college campuses, barbershop harmony of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and vocal popular music in the twentieth century. The ‹rst two are explored in this chapter, and the third will be discussed in chapter 3, a sequence that should not suggest the independence of each genre and practice. Rather, they often intersected and interacted, and each also shows traits both similar to and different from today’s a cappella. Choral Ensembles in Colonial, Federal, and Nineteenth-Century America The church or meetinghouse was a common base for choirs in colonial and early federal America, especially among New England youth, where the teaching of collective singing to amateurs was institutionalized in a religious context .3 The founding of secular societies dedicated to choral singing, such as the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (1815), is also signi‹cant for the degree that they organized choral activity and invested it with prestige.4 And choral singing grew as the nineteenth century continued. Old World glee clubs, particularly those in England and Germany, such as the Noblemen and Gentlemen ’s Catch Club in London (1761) and the Glee Club (1783), were models for American clubs such as the Deutsche Liederkranz (1847) and its rival, the Männergesangverein Arion (1854), both in New York City; the Mendelssohn Glee Club (New York City, 1866); the Apollo Club (Boston, 1871); the Apollo Club (Chicago, 1872); the Mendelssohn Club (Philadelphia, 1874); and other clubs in Midwestern cities.5 Many were community efforts embracing the increasingly common rhetoric of edi‹cation and music as a moral force. For example, “rather than emphasizing stars, virtuosity, publicity, and the national stage, Chicago’s choral music tradition [perpetuated] community ideals of participation , education, uplift, civic pride, and the local stage.”6 While many of these organizations, such as the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, dedicated themselves to large-scale choral works with orchestral accompaniment, their European predecessors also performed short, smaller-scale secular pieces such as glees, catches, canons, and rounds. And although the glee repertory included pieces that called for women’s voices, both the Old and New World clubs were largely men’s domains.7 12 powerful voices [3.234.177.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:23 GMT) Students of the era followed suit. Published tune books and songsters present evidence of colonial choral groups at Yale and Harvard Universities whose repertory included psalms, fuging tunes, and drinking songs.8 From the ‹rst commencement at Dartmouth College until the 1790s, the Musical Choir regularly sang anthems, including some composed by the school’s graduates.9 Marshall Bartholomew’s unpublished history of the Yale Glee Club describes the Yale Musical Society...