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Essentials in
Board
Keynote address by Gary Bolles - January 2007 Board Meeting
Address to the Society Board at its January 26, 2007 meeting at Albuquerque.
Updated: 2/28/2007 4:01:04 PM
Society Board Meeting
January 26, 2007
Keynote Address
Presented by
Gary Bolles
A World of Harmony
Good Morning! It’s good to see so many of my friends and colleagues and, for those of you who know me well, I’m sure you find it amazing I’m seeing anything at this ungodly hour of the day! But it’s a New Year and we face a world of opportunity – opportunity to reach out, to enrich lives and share the joys of singing in the barbershop style. And what a World of Harmony it is!
Since we began spreading our style of harmony past our borders, we have become truly international in scope. We have seen our World of Harmony extend from Canada to nearly a dozen nations. We have helped form and support the World Harmony Council and reveled in its annual World Harmony Jamboree. In recent years, we’ve heard barbershop harmonies sung by visiting groups from Austria, Russia, China and Japan and seen the joy those harmonies have brought to the face of each one of those singers. We have witnessed wonderful quartet and chorus performances in International competition by our friends from BABS, SNOBS, DABS, AAMBS and NZABS, home of our current MBNA Collegiate Quartet Champions, The Musical Island Boys!
And that reminds us of another aspect of our World of Harmony – our youth outreach. Barbershop harmony is being sung in more high schools and by more young men than ever before. We have Harmony Explosion Camps and Youth Harmony Festivals taking place all over the country. There is nothing quite like watching the face of a young man experiencing the feeling of his first “chordasm” and hearing him say, “Wait, wait! Let’s do that again!” And he does it again, and again and again. And those young men are going on to college and spreading the joy they’ve found ringing chords with three other guys. Is it any wonder why, for the second time now, we’ve seen a quartet rise from their success as Collegiate Quartet Champions to become our International Quartet Champions, Vocal Spectrum. And who among us wasn’t on his feet cheering after the incredible performance given by the young men of The Westminster Chorus last July.
With our world and youth outreach producing such fine results, one would think it safe to say our World of Harmony is in great shape. But there are clouds and not just on the horizon, they’re right overhead – and they’re getting thicker! Let me explain…
I attended my first International Convention in 1965, barely a year after I joined the Society. There were people singing tags and woodshedding in every nook and cranny of the Sheraton Boston nearly 24 hours a day. Here I was, a 17 year old kid, getting dragged into the swimming pool to fill in the baritone with three old guys from God knows where on “Last Night Was the End of the World”. How cool was that? It was like that for several years, I sang with dozens of guys who would sing songs I’d never heard and patiently let me find my way through them so we could all feel the chords. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, the atmosphere around hotel lobbies began to change. There was less “tagging” and people were changing from saying “Let’s sing this” to “Do you know that?” I’d watch as the guy who didn’t know “that” shrugged his shoulders and stepped aside for someone who did. Shut out – there went his World of Harmony. I wondered, “Why is this happening?”
As many of you know, I’ve been a Certified Judge for more than 30 years. From my seat in the pit, I’ve observed a similar trend over the past several years. I’ve noticed more and more quartets and choruses in which the singers seem to be mechanically singing the notes of their parts at each other, each singer independently singing almost in spite of the other singers around him. I mean sure, our top groups just keep getting better and better, but more and more of our average performers seem to have trouble getting chords to ring and singing with joy of barbershop harmony in their hearts – our World of Harmony seems to escape them. And again I wonder, “Why is this happening?”
We hear about the Pioneers and their Buffalo Bills Era contest and all the references to singing the old songs the old way as if there is something wrong with the songs we sing today and the way we sing them. What is it these folks are missing from their World of Harmony that they feel the need to recapture something from 50 years ago? “Why is this happening?”
I got my first inkling when I began working with high school boys at our Nor Cal Youth Harmony Camp. We tried different music and different approaches and discovered that what worked the best, what sounded the best and, most important of all, what the boys enjoyed the best was singing tags and simple songs in small groups. We make sure now that every boy gets to feel his own voice contribute to a ringing chord. Each boy gets to learn how good it feels to allow his voice to sound like the others and he gets to experience how adjusting his note to fit the chord makes the hair on his arms stand up. And what they learn singing tags and simple songs in small groups they bring to their chorus and quartets. We discovered if we let the boys explore and experiment on their own, with a bit of guidance here and there, we didn’t have to work very hard to teach them songs. They had already begun to discover our World of Harmony. And man, can they harmonize! And I wondered, “Why isn’t this happening everywhere?”
But things really clicked into place when I had the opportunity to travel overseas and work with barbershoppers in New Zealand. What I discovered there truly alarmed me. Here is a whole country where some very talented people have been singing barbershop for something like 30 years with ample access to our music, coaching and judging yet even their best groups are struggling to sound like barbershop – they have yet to discover our World of Harmony. And I wondered yet again, “Why is this happening?”
Then I was asked to coach a group of talented young men called “The Musical Island Boys” and it was while working with them that I realized why all this is happening. Here were four really gifted young singers who absolutely love barbershop harmony. They had learned all the notes, words, interpretations and even the choreographies, the mechanics, if you will, of the great quartets they were trying to emulate but they didn’t have a clue how to make the sound of barbershop. And as we worked together discovering how barbershop harmony works, it occurred to me that this was exactly what was not happening in the hotel lobbies, stages and rehearsal halls of our own Society and those of most of our world affiliate organizations and why we had had such success with the youth.
Here’s what I believe is going on. In our effort to grow and promote the universal appeal and benefit of singing barbershop harmony, we have, in entirely too many cases, left out a most important part of the puzzle – the harmony! We provide arrangements and multi-track learning media for a vast array of barbershop music but trying to get people to experience what harmony is by encouraging them to learn parts is a lot like trying to teach budding artists how to paint using paint-by-numbers kits. I, mean, you’ll get something recognizable but we all know there’s more to it than that and, if the result is to ever rise above mediocrity, we’re going to have to teach them the art of painting.
It’s the same for barbershop harmony. We cannot expect to open our World of Harmony to people by simply making arrangements, learning media and recordings (paint-by-numbers kits) of barbershop music available to them. There’s more to it than that. I remember going to inter-chapter visits with Bob Johnson, Dave Stevens, Mac Huff, Lou Perry, Dave LaBar and many others, visits at which I learned things about how barbershop harmony works – things I use in my coaching to this very day. Those visits were free, close to home and available to every member on or near a regular meeting night – and they taught me what made barbershop feel so different. The Society and those fabulous teachers cared enough about bringing their World of Harmony to me to spend their time and effort to teach me everything I could learn. And they inspired me to “pass it forward”. That personal contact with such dedicated, expert teachers early in my barbershop life was a critical component in my choice to make barbershopping an integral part of my life and I believe it opened our World of Harmony for thousands of others as well.
But in more recent times, we’ve relied more on a paint-by-numbers approach and less on personal contact, more on centralized schools and recordings than on face-to-face, hands-on experience to promote our World of Harmony. And, along the way, that decreased personal contact with the average guy, in my opinion, has led to a significant dissolution of our style. It’s not songs the pioneers are missing – it’s the harmony! It’s not the music our new members and world partners are missing – it’s the harmony! In so many places from average chapters to whole affiliate organizations, our World of Harmony eludes our singers because, when we reach out to grow, we often fail to provide the most important element of all: Our sound, our art, our world of barbershop harmony.
I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we must find ways to bring our World of Harmony closer to our members and world partners so they can learn to feel the sound of close harmony personally. One sure way to do that is to find ways to make our experts and experienced teachers more accessible to them. The vast majority of our Society membership and that of our world partners are not able to attend our district Harmony Colleges or Harmony University. We need to find ways to bring similar experiences closer to them – perhaps through something more local, like multi-chapter meetings or festivals – so they can have a chance to experience our World of Harmony first hand.
Gentlemen, our Society needs to find more effective ways to reach out with more than our music to every man who shows an interest in barbershop harmony. We need to reach out to him with our time, our talent, our expertise and our voices to share all the things we know barbershop harmony can be – no matter where in the world or how young or old he may be. Because, my friends, it is our World of Harmony, not just our music, that is the true essence of Barbershopping and it is our World of Harmony that we must share.
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