Home Again!

From Thursday to Sunday last week I was in Gambier, Ohio on the campus of Kenyon College. A beautiful idyllic spot. There were about 300 men there for the Apple Corps District Music School for the 58 Barbershop Harmony Choruses from Western PA, Northern WV, and Ohio. Thirty-Seven chapters represented. It was an awesome experience of singing, education and fellowship.

This picture shows the 13 of us who went from our 16 voice chorus.

Imagine walking around the campus and hearing groups of men singing barbershop style. Spontaneous group singing occurred everywhere, in the hallways, outside buildings, in the lunch line, around the meal tables, back at the dorms everywhere. Of course most of them have the music memorized so all they need is a pitch pipe, and no other musical instruments or sheet music and they're singing.

The courses offered provided a multitude of learning opportunities on a myriad of subjects. I took "Get Out of the Box." A class on learning to use your face arms and hands as well as body when singing to help sell the song or tell the story's song. I also took a course on how to be a better bass as well as a course on "Better sight singing and barbershop style versus church choir style." Each class was two and a half hours long with a short break of 15 minutes in between. The latter two courses were filled with music theory as well as how the voice works and where in the 4 places in the head where sound is produced for resonance. Interestingly I learned that chords ring when all four voices are resonating sound from the same area of the vocal cavity. The instructors were awesome and experts in their field. I learned so much !

We were all part of a Massed choir. We prepared two songs for the concert on Saturday night. There were over a hundred in the choir. See picture below. The chorus director was awesome. Lots of fun, but all with a focus on the final outcome of our singing. I learned (actually we all learned) so much from him about music in the process of learning the music. Someone said, "You learned music as you learned the song." Good stuff.

Our Bogmiester group became one of a unit for being there and experiencing so many things about barbershop style together. We have a better idea of what our director, Susan, has been trying to teach us.

On the first night there we were allowed to put our names in the barrel to be in a pick-up quartet to sing on stage with guys we never met before. I thought I'd give it a try. The rules were that you had 5 minutes to select a song you all knew, and to give your group a name. We selected "Honey/Little Eyes I love you" and since it had rained hard earlier in the day we chose the "Four Drips" as our group name. We didn't win, but it was an invigorating challenge for me as a new barbershoper. It was fun. One of the guys in our group did sing in the winning quartet and now we'll have to hear about it till the next Apple Corp Camp.

Oh yes, the meals were awesome! All buffet style for each meal. A wide selection of hot and cold items all the time. All you could eat. And some people really piled it on. All in all it was an awesome experience and one I'm sure I'll not forget for a long long time.