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Originally posted in the Kansas City Choral

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers." – William Shakespeare

"No man is an island." – John Donne

"Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow" – Swedish Proverb

The longer I direct choirs, and the longer I live, the more convinced I am of the fact that it's all about relationships. This is not a new concept, but I guess I'm a slow learner. An introvert by nature, I've never found it easy to build relationships, but I've grown to understand that they are the key to success in just about every area of life. When we take steps to make our choirs communities and families, and when through our leadership our choirs become safe havens, we are meeting one aspect of the human soul's greatest need – the need for community.

Most of us have experienced a new beginning recently. Whether we direct choirs in schools, community groups, or houses of worship, the end of summer and beginning of fall means a fresh start, and new faces in our choirs. Have you thought about how to build community and family in your choirs this year? Of course, I feel like I'm "preaching to the choir" (yes, that pun was intended!) because I know many of you are better at this and more intentional about it than I am, but I still feel compelled to remind us all of how important this aspect of our job is. As choir directors, each of us has the potential to be a minister in the sense that we care for people. Through music, and through community, we have the tools to enrich our singers' lives and to teach them and ourselves how to be better people.

I'd like to share a little about a wonderful community I recently had the opportunity to join. Although I sang in a barbershop quartet in high school, and for a short time again when I was a grad student, I've never been an avid "barbershopper," but this summer, thanks to a generous scholarship from the Capital City Chorus in Topeka, I got the chance to attend an amazing week of singing and fellowshipping at Harmony University, sponsored by the Barbershop Harmony Society. It happens in St. Joseph, Missouri each summer, and I highly recommend it. Want to know why? Read on.

This incredible week was full of pleasant surprises. The first surprise had to do with vocal technique. The old stereotypical paint-peeling, vain-popping barbershop vocal production was nowhere to be found. I took a class called Advanced Vocal Technique with Darin Drown, the baritone of the 2010 International Championship quartet, Storm Front. Darin, a high school choral director in the Denver, Colorado area, taught nothing more or less than classic bel canto technique in his class, and the diehard barbershoppers loved it. I heard beautiful and healthy singing all week from some extremely talented and well-trained singers. The second surprise was that the average attendee at this conference had an astonishing grasp of ear training and functional music theory. I'd always known that barbershop singing was a completely a cappella art, but seeing the fruit of it still surprised me. These guys (and girls – more about that later) would stand around in clusters and teach each other new tags in a minute or two. For the uninitiated, a tag is the last few bars of a barbershop song. To teach a tag to a quartet, one singer will quickly sing each part a few times to each of the other singers, and then they'll sing it together, striving for that coveted barbershop ring that happens when the chords are precisely in tune. What amazed me in this process was how quickly the teachers and singers could communicate and learn these short pieces, usually with no printed music in front of them. It was not unusual to see someone singing their own part while simultaneously using hand signs, solfège, or numbers to remind one or two of the other singers how their parts went. Also, many of these singers are always aware of which part of the chord they are singing at any given time. This enabled them to sing their note slightly higher or lower than equal temperament when necessary in order to make the chords ring absolutely true. All of this sometimes took place in a crowded cafeteria with as many as six or seven different groups singing different tags in different keys at the same time, so it took a lot of concentration!

Another surprise was how many women attended Harmony U. The Barbershop Harmony Society is an organization of men's choruses, but perhaps 15% of the attendees were women, many of them directors of men's barbershop choruses. When I told one of them that I was hoping to encourage the formation of some quartets among the guys in my college choirs, she said, "Make sure you tell the girls they can sing barbershop, too. If they discover it later in life, they'll be mad at you if you didn't let them get involved earlier!"

The Barbershop Harmony Society is very attentive to the needs of vocal music educators. Want some help starting a quartet or chorus among your singers? Give their home office a call. They've got staff members ready to help by supplying music and other resources (many of them free!), and they can put you in touch with barbershoppers in your area who are willing to come to your school and help jump start your program.

I began this article talking about community, and my experience at Harmony University was a beautiful illustration of its importance. I came to Harmony U as a stranger – I didn't know a single person there. When I left I had new friends from all over the United States, as well as from Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia. Many of these people and I had very little in common – we came from different cultures, educational backgrounds, and career fields, but singing together brought us together. Well, the free ice cream 24 hours a day didn't hurt, either.

Every August, the Barbershop Harmony Society holds Harmony University, a weeklong music education workshop, on campus.

I decided it was time to find out a litlle bit more about the hundreds of barbershop Quartet members who descend on Missouri Western every summer and entertain us in four-part harmony while we work. So I arranged to shadow a Harmony U. attendee, and at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 4. the fifth day of the workshop, I lound myself sitting in on their general session in the Potter Hall theater.

I've been to a lot of conferences and workshops before. But this was the first general session I had ever been to where the participants were required to b-r-e-e-e-a-the, stretch their tongues, massage their throats and sing. Hearing an entire theater of barbershoppers singing was a great way to start the day!

So that was my first surprise, because I just expected something like general announcements; I didn't expect to hear a chorus of 500 singing, "I Don't Know Why I Love You Like I Do" so early in the morning.

But speaking of announcements, the man who gave the announcements threw in a pretty good pun. In the music world, the term "woodshedding" means practicing, so the announcer said, "How much wood would a woodshedder shed if a woodshedder could shed wood?" Answer: "A chord or two!"

Now I thought that joke was funny, even though I didn't know what a "Woodshedder" was at the time. But I have to admit that the speakers did say some things in the general session that everyone laughed at but me. I just didn't know all the barbershopper jargon.

After the general session, I got my second surprise. I would not be following around an individual; I was going to shadow a whole quartet! In all the years that I had seen the barbershoppers come and go, I never realized that there were actually three conference tracks or "colleges" to the workshop: quartets, individuals and directors. In the quartet college, the four members attend every session together. My Quartet was Chordiology, from southeastern Michigan. Dave Spizarny, Rob Pettigrew and Paul Ellinger had been part of Chordiology since it began 22 years ago, and Clifton Dake had been in the Quartet for 12 years. Paul, the lead, owns an insurance agency. Clifton, the tenor, is in industrial sales. Rob is the baritone and an IT guy for the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. And Dave, who sings bass, is a radiologist.

The quartet has performed all over the Midwest, and in 2007, they were named champions in their district.

"Our love for singing and barbershopping got us started," Rob said. "But we are best friends. and that's what kept us together for over 20 years. We feel blessed to hang out with our friends and make incredible music together."

Paul performed with an a cappella pop group for 11 years in addition to performing with Chordiology. "This is 10 times harder, but more rewarding." he said of barbershop music.

"I was brought up singing barbershop and I was hooked on it immediately: Clifton said. His father was in a barbershop chorus that won the first internalional compelition ever held.

Rob said his homeroom teacher in high school was also the choir director, and "she told me I was going to join the choir." The first song she taught them was a barbershop song.

Dave, too, was in high school when he was first introduced to barbershop singing, when their choir wanted to play a trick on a student during their performance. The student was going to be in a barber chair and didn't know that he'd get covered with shaving cream. The teacher said they needed to learn a barbershop song, so they went to a local barbershop quartet's rehearsal. "I was walking down the hall and I thought it was 100 guys singing, and it was one quartet." Dave said. He was hooked.

All four men had attended Harmony U. before and couldn't say enough good things about it. "The best coaches in the Society are here," Dave said. "These are the experts at barbershop and the best teachers."

Our first session was for all the quartets. Paut pointed out a gentleman at the session that had been named the best tenor in the history of the Harmony Barbershop Society.

Two quartets stood out in the crowd - one that consisted of two married couples, called "The Honeymooners" and one a quartet of high schoolers. Women barbershoppers are called Sweet Adelines, and since 1992, women have been allowed in at Harmony U. But a quartet of two men and two women is still an unusual sight at the workshop. And the high schoolers? Well, most of the quartet members are probably closer to middle age or older, but the number of young barbershoppers is growing.

This particular session offered tips on self-coaching your group and offered sage advice even if you weren't part of a barbershop quartet: For every "gentle suggestion" give two positive comments. Another session that week had focused on marketing your quartet, another on contracts.

On our way to the next session, we stopped to visit with tile Reens family from Greensburg, IN. Mom, dad, and three sons ages 13, 11 and 10 were attending Harmony U. for the first time. "We've been singing since we were babies," said Bernard, age 10. The quartet's next sessions helped me undersland the great value of Harmony U. When quartets compete, they are judged on three criteria - singing, music, and presentation. So three sessions each day are based on those criteria (along with a fourth session on overall performance), and each quartet meets individually with a coach. They meet with the same four coaches all week, so each quartet who attends Harmony U. gains huge amounts of information and insight tailored just for them.

Rik Johnson worked with Chordiology on singing. Employed at IBM in O'Fallon, Mo., he was originally a music major in college and wanted to be a music teacher, so Harmony U. fulfills that dream, he said. Barry Towner, who was the quartet's overall performance coach, is an executive management consultant from Toronto. The week after this Harmony U., he was heading to Germany to coach at its Harmony U. Incidentally, the coaches do not get paid for Harmony U.; they all volunteer their time.

While my quartet went to lunch, I stopped by the "office" to visit with Sherry Lewis, who works for the Harmony Barbershop Society at its headquarters in Nashville, Tenn. She was serving as the registrar this year for the first time. Afthough it was only Sherry's third year at Western, Harmony U. has been holding its workshops on Western's campus every year but one since the mid-1970s. "It's because of the high level of cooperation of your conference staff," she told me. "We've looked at other places, but we can't locate a better staff."

She also told me that they had attendees this year from 10 foreign countries, including New Zealand and Japan, and someone from every state in the United States. "If we're missing a state, I can't think what it would be. We even have someone from Alaska." Some years, there has been as many as 600 barbershoppers, but this year, Ihe number was closer to 500.

I attended two more sessions with my Quartet. Phrases such as "awesome breaths," "magical transitions," and "lyrical resolution" liberally peppered the lessons. In the last session, my quartet performed the song they were planning to sing Friday night, when every quartet performs in Potter Hall Theater. The guys had made up their own words to "Nevertheless" that had me laughing through the whole number.

After that session, I visited with Rob, Clifton, Paul and Dave for a little while longer and then I got up to leave. Wait! The quartet wanted to serenade me with "Don't Be a Baby, Baby" before I left. What more could a girl ask for? It was a perfect ending to a fun day.

Two quartets from the Tucson area appeared on local TV broadcasts on Wednesday, January 18 during the Midwinter Convention.

Joint Venture sang and interviewed on "Morning Blend", a show on the local ABC channel Wednesday morning at 11:00. To listen, click here.

Touch of Grey recorded two songs and an interview for the local PBS channel which aired Wednesday evening from 6:30 to 7:00. The interview covered the history of barbershop music and of the Society. To listen, click here.

The local NBC Channel covered the Youth Festival with a short segment of The 505 chorus from Albuquerque, NM in their evening news on Saturday, January 21.

Originally posted in KUNC.org

With shows like American Idol bringing a major increase in revenue dollars for TV networks, there's an old American musical art form which is also seeing an increase in popularity with a younger audience across the country, and right here in Colorado.

There's an interesting phenomenon taking hold in the Barbershop Quartet world. You know barbershop? "…Hello my baby, Hello my darling, hello my ragtime gal..?" Yea, it's pretty old and outdated.

But YouTube "Gaga Barbershop Quartet", and you'll find a group of high school guys singing Lady Gaga's "Poker Face". It sounds nothing like the barbershop you remember. The young group is from Yorkville, IL a suburb of Chicago.

Groups like this are sprouting up all across the country, including right here in Colorado.

One of the Colorado groups is called "Foundation." They're the current Rocky Mountain Barbershop Collegiate Quartet Champion, and are a part of the large barbershop chorus "Sound of the Rockies" from Centennial Colorado... Click here to read more and listen to an audio sample...