Washington University in St. Louis is a campus full of musical life. There are plenty of opportunities for students to express themselves creatively, from Music Department sponsored ensembles and private lessons to the myriad of formal and informal student-run music groups. If you’re a freshman on campus right now, you’ve probably heard the harmonious cry ringing from the Clocktower to Brookings and beyond. Yes, it’s that time of year again - the age of dormstorming, aca-bopping and a few too many jnn’s and dmm’s…

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a cappella auditions.

And if you’re looking to audition, you’ve probably gone online to do a little research and found… well, really not much at all. While each group has their own website and Facebook page, there’s no source that tells the story of a cappella at WashU as a whole. I remember searching around my freshman year only to find...

In my first post I trace some of the historical and musical developments in collegiate a cappella, connecting our current atmosphere to longstanding Ivy-League music societies influenced by post-war pop music. It is easy to base an understanding of a cappella within the musical output and developing history, but in this post I want to go further. I’m looking for the reason a cappella resonates so strongly with the singers themselves, and how it contributes to personal and community development on college campuses.

As a reference I’d like to introduce the work of André de Quadros, a conductor and ethnomusicologist at Boston University, and in particular his work directing choirs in prisons through the umbrella of Boston University’s Prison Education Program.

These choir rehearsals are three-hour participatory music sessions where participants sing and move together, incorporating...

Welcome! First off I want to say thanks for reading along - this whole blogging thing has been very new and exciting. Writing, I have found, is a wonderful habit - I’ve been pointed in new directions, clarified my own thinking, received a great deal of encouragement and advice from people I now consider new mentors, connected with old friends about familiar topics and am finally beginning to see many of the elements of Beyond the Score coming together! But I’ve been a little scattered up to this point. Today’s post tries to step back and paint a broader picture in order to frame the overall context for my research/writing.

My first post outlines the primary observation that I am trying to address through this project:

What role does a notated score play in a musical tradition that does not use a score in performance?

There’s a lot packed into that statement. And you may notice that...

Boy, it’s amazing living with talented and creative people. Not only is it a pleasure to listen to their music and share in the delight of combined music making, but it pushes my own creativity further in all aspects of my life. This summer I’m trying to collaborate with my friends to highlight some of the great music happening around St. Louis, as well as provide an opportunity to relate the music back around to central themes from Beyond The Score, my a cappella project.

Last time, Cassie Parks and I took on Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel Im Spiegel” and got lost in the moment. This time we’ve got Rohan Shirali (Stypes GC / Beat Therapy president / singer-songwriter) who, in addition to all those credits, is my roommate, a best friend and large contributor to the collection of 8 guitars in our apartment.

Rohan’s got an album coming coming out this Fall - “From Another Time”. Earlier this week...

Last week I had the incredible opportunity to attend Next Level Arrangements, an a cappella workshop led by Tom Anderson and hosted by The Vocal Company. To say that I learned something would be an understatement. It broadened my musical perspective, introduced me to warmhearted new friends/mentors and changed the way that I understand a cappella music.

The workshop was centered around hands-on learning and nicely balanced analysis with interaction and participation. While there were modules on storytelling and arc, advanced harmony, counterpoint and texture, we also had an overarching project: to collaboratively arrange and track a song from scratch (a lot harder than it sounds when you’re used to being plugged into Finale! - keep on the lookout for the final product released by TVC!)

Our lessons were taught over platefuls of scrambled eggs. Lessons led to tangents which led to more...

I stumbled across this quote on the train this morning:

All people must be able to place their music firmly in the context of the totality of their beliefs, experiences and activities, for without such ties, music cannot exist. This means that there must be a body of theory connected with any music system–not necessarily a theory of the structure of musical sound, although that may be present as well, but rather a theory of what music is, what it does, and how it is coordinated with the total environment, both natural and cultural, in which man moves. –Alan P. Merriam

I picked up the book last night – a nice look at Arvo Pärt by Paul Hillier. Here, Hillier was using this reference to explain that the identity of Pärt’s music could not be sustained without directly reflecting other (i.e. non-musical) meanings or modes of thought. For a full understanding of the music you must...

This past weekend Cassie Parks, a friend and fellow WashU musician, met up with me in a ballroom at midnight to collaborate on Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel Im Spiegel for violin and piano. A piece seeming so simple, it is easy to dismiss as background noise or Musak. But Spiegel Im Spiegel lacks definition, and that’s what gives it a mystical and elusive, yet commanding and quasi-spiritual character.

Take a listen:

Pärt’s music hangs by a thread. When immersed in the sound, like sitting at the piano, it can be easy to get lost in the expanse and bow to the “power of music to obliterate the rigidities of time and space” (Alex Ross’ words, not mine).

Sometimes it strangely feels as if there is no music at all - that life is simply happening - due to the lack of an expressive melody and a predictable, stepwise motion. But this makes sense. Historically Spiegel Im Spiegel can be thought of as...

A cappella has certainly taken the collegiate and popular music worlds by storm recently. It’s on TV (the Sing-Off, Glee); it’s in the movies (Pitch Perfect); it’s topping the charts (Pentatonix cracks Billboard’s Top 10); it’s producing top recording artists (Sara Bareilles and John Legend were both in college groups at UCLA and Penn) and selling out concerts across the country (ICCA Finals in NYC sold out in 11 hours).

Most strikingly though, a cappella is attracting more and more talented and diverse singers that probably would have not joined a choir otherwise. Considering the 6-8 hour time commitment per-week that most groups require to hold rehearsal, arrange new music, pursue gigs, perform and socialize, a cappella is an enormous commitment in an already packed college schedule. Yet students are rushing to join one of the thousands of groups across the country, entering into a...

Well I suppose that’s how you’re supposed to start your blog, right? Oh boy, off to a dry start here.

But really. I feel like I have to start writing. And this seems like the thing to do. So here I am. Blogging. Oh boy. Starting is hard… I’ll just jump right in I guess.

I am unendingly curious about music.

I geek out to my friends in The Stereotypes constantly. About art (Leo and I got into a yelling match last summer over Rothko’s Orange And Yellow ). About modernity (I once led a Stypes warmup where we learned a tune and then said “everyone pick your own tempo - go!”). About singing, and (increasingly) it’s physicality (yet another Stypes warmup where we built the big ascending cluster in Whitacre’s When David Heard (start at 9:40), and then messed around with vowel morphs and dynamics - molding music like it was clay!). About John Cage (Shouldn’t we appreciate each sound for what...