Powerful Voices: The Musical and Social World of Collegiate A Cappella by Joshua S. Duchan (review)

From the lasting legacies of barbershop and doo-wop to the overwhelming recent popularity of the television show Glee, a cappella singing styles have become a regular feature in the American popular music landscape over the past century. One such vocal genre sung in a cappella style, called simply “a cappella,” has found extensive popularity on college campuses within the last 30 years. Currently, hundreds of institutions of higher education in the United States host over 1,000 active groups of amateur vocalists in all-male, all-female, or mixed ensembles devoted to singing their own innovative arrangements of mostly popular music repertoire. Powerful Voices: The Musical and Social World of Collegiate A Cappella by Joshua S. Duchan is the first scholarly book to document this genre.

The book is divided into two main parts. The first half, comprising four chapters, sketches a history of the predecessors of modern American collegiate a cappella. Duchan begins with a brief examination of secular nineteenth- and early twentieth-century a cappella genres that are often deemed precursors to modern collegiate a cappella, such as the glee club and barbershop music. Following this historical introduction is an entire chapter devoted to the history and stylistic development of The Whiffenpoofs, the legendary Yale University men’s ensemble that is often viewed as the first true a cappella group, over the course of the twentieth century. An examination of the use of close vocal harmony in American popular music during the same time period follows, concluding finally with an examination of how the contemporary genre “a cappella” crystallized from these historical influences and “exploded” in popularity beginning in the late 1980s.

The second half of the volume provides a more extended analysis of musical and social elements central to contemporary a cappella. It begins with a thorough style description of contemporary a cappella, including defining musical concepts that are central to the vocal production of the genre: arrangement, syllables, vocal style, vocal percussion, and ideals of emulation/originality. The following chapters examine how these aesthetic choices are manifested within rehearsal, performance, and recording situations as expressions of individual and group identity as well as signifiers of power and prestige.

Gender emerges as one of the key sites for these negotiations of identity. Drawing on his own observations of a cappella rehearsals and performances and quotations from collegiate a cappella singers, Duchan not only demonstrates how humor and gesture in performance define group identities—an important part in performing both for concerts and for competitions—but also how deeply these physical or visual aspects of a performance define individual and group masculinities and femininities. This focus on gender, particularly female experiences (many of Duchan’s informants are women), is refreshing and unusual within amateur and popular music studies.

In what might seem to be a surprising twist for readers acquainted with a cappella primarily as a genre performed live, Duchan places technology as the other central site of negotiation of identity within a cappella communities. This focus is fitting; the University of Michigan Press’s series “Tracking Pop” (of which this book is a part) is known for its authors’ innovative, theoretical analyses of popular music styles. Although Duchan’s focus is more social than analytical, his deft examination of technology as the heart of individual and group power struggles during both live performances and recording sessions re-conceptualizes the nature of “composer’s” and “performer’s” music as well as the very concepts of “live” and “recorded.” The interrelationships of consumption of recorded popular materials, the creation of live performances, and the canonization of new a cappella works provide an elegant conclusion to the work, shedding light on a complexity within amateur music making that is rarely explored.

Duchan—an assistant professor of ethno-musicology at Wayne State University—has been an active participant in the...