Collegiate A Cappella: Emulation and Originality

Collegiate a Cappella: Emulation and Originality
Author(s): Joshua S. Duchan

Source: American Music, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Winter, 2007), pp. 477-506
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40071679
Accessed: 17-05-2016 03:28 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40071679?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
American Music
This content downloaded from 129.78.56.193 on Tue, 17 May 2016 03:28:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
JOSHUA S.DUCHAN
Collegiate A Cappella:
Emulation and Originality
A cappella groups thrive on college and university campuses throughout

the nation (and beyond). The genre of amateur vocal music these groups
represent has grown prodigiously in numbers and prominence over the
past twenty-five years or so. There are now about a thousand collegiate a
cappella groups in the United States, many of whom in recent years have
seen flattering press coverage in major media outlets.1 Typically consisting of up to sixteen singers who come in all-male, all-female, and mixed
varieties, these groups draw most of their repertory from popular music
recordings of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Collegiate a cappella balances emulation - a desire to sound like its

recorded models - with an aspiration for originality. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines "emulation" as "the endeavour to equal or surpass
others in any achievement or quality."2 This nicely captures how the
term applies to a musical practice that uses certain techniques in order
for the vocal-only presentation of a song to "equal" the commercial recording (which usually includes instruments). These techniques might
be described as "imitation" or "mimicry," especially if the instrumental
function of the vocal parts is clear. Other techniques, however, aim to
"surpass" the commercial recording. By offering new musical ideas,
those techniques add originality to the song and/or its presentation.
Although emulation and originality have an inherent tension and sometimes contradict each other, both pervade the practice of a cappella.
Joshua S. Duchan received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Michi-
gan in 2007. The present article is adapted from a portion of his dissertation,
"Powerful Voices: Performance and Interaction in Contemporary Collegiate A
Cappella." He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Music Department at
Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Mich., where he teaches courses in American
music, world music and cultures, and popular music.
American Music Winter 2007
2008 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
478
Duchan
Certain musical characteristics distinguish collegiate a cappella from

other American popular and secular vocal ensembles, such as barbershop quartets, doo-wop groups, and glee clubs. First, a cappella takes
recordings of rock songs as its raw material and maintains rock's musical distinction between the lead solo and its accompaniment, whereas
barbershop draws its repertory from the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries and features primarily equal-voice settings.3 Second,

the vocal percussion and degree of instrumental imitation found in a
cappella (both described below) separate it from doo-wop, which relied
on pitched voices and, in some cases, actual instruments for its rhythmic drive.4 Third, the limited size and student leadership of a cappella
groups sets them apart from most modern glee clubs.5
Because collegiate a cappella takes popular recordings as its raw material, it provides an excellent case study of intertextuality and recontextualization in popular music. At its core lies the practice of "covering."
Although terminological agreement seems elusive, scholars tend to distinguish between at least two types of covering. David Horn draws a
distinction between covering, which "generally requires some kind of
close approximation to an original," and "interpreting," which "may
possibly involve that, but does not have to."6 Deena Weinstein pairs the
idea of a cover with that of a "version," and differentiates the two by
their reference to preexisting material:
A cover song iterates (with more or fewer differences) a prior recorded performance of a song by a particular artist, rather than
simply the song itself as an entity separate from any performer
or performance. When the song itself (as opposed to the performance) is taken as the reference for iteration, each performer does
a version or a rendition of the song, and none of these versions is
a necessary reference.7
On the other hand, Serge Lacasse associates "the idea of interpretation

or reading" directly with the process of covering, which he defines as "a
rendering of a previously recorded song that displays the usual stylistic
configuration of the covering artist."8 Note Lacasse's and Weinstein's
specific references to previously recorded material, which is not found
in Horn's distinction but which is particularly relevant to collegiate a
cappella.
I take Weinstein's definitions as a point of departure because they offer

the most useful and specific distinction within the realm of mimetic, in-
tertextual practices. Despite the theoretical distinctions in the discourse

of popular music scholarship, however, genres also exist in which such
distinctions as "covers" and "versions" necessarily blur. The techniques
discussed here, and the social motivations for them, illustrate how a cappella draws on both ideas simultaneously.9
Collegiate A Cappella 479

The claims in this article do not necessarily apply to all collegiate a cap-
pella groups. They are based primarily on ethnographic research with a

handful of groups and my own experience with a cappella in various capacities.10 The historical background with which I begin merely sketches
a cappella's history in order to provide context. Thereafter I hope to lay
a foundation on which future a cappella research can build.11
Historical Background
Collegiate a cappella emerged from earlier vocal genres on college and
university campuses, including colonial and early nineteenth-century
choral groups at universities such as Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale.
Surviving tunebooks and songsters, containing both sacred and secular
songs, offer evidence of organized college singing in colonial America.12
In 1807, the Handel Society was founded at Dartmouth College.13 The
following year saw the start of the Pierian Sodality, an instrumental club
at Harvard whose meetings also included singing.14 The Yale Musical

Society, founded in 1812, was an ensemble of twelve chapel singers,
and in 1826, the school's Beethoven Society added secular songs to its
repertory.15 Groups like these performed at commencement ceremonies
and proms, and sometimes traveled to instructional "conventions" and
academic festivals across New England.
Collegiate glee clubs appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century,
with the first founded in 1858 at Harvard by Benjamin William Crowninshield after earlier attempts in 1833, 1834, and 1841 failed to take root.16
Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Yale students formed vocal ensembles with other members of their class; the Yale Glee Club coalesced in
1861 out of this tradition. Glee clubs were (and largely continue to be)
single-sex ensembles, which for several decades operated without the
direct leadership of university personnel. For example, the University
of Michigan Men's Glee Club, founded in 1859, first came under faculty
leadership in 1908, and the Harvard Glee Club was led by Archibald T.
Davison, professor of choral music at Harvard, beginning in 1912.17
Small vocal ensembles formed within and alongside college glee clubs
and were popular as early as the 1840s.18 Collegiate a cappella is often said
to start with the Whiffenpoofs, a seven-man group that emerged from

the Varsity Quartet, an elite subset of the Yale Glee Club. The Whiffenpoofs began in January 1909, with regular weekly performances at Mory's
Temple Bar, a popular student pub in New Haven. They are generally
regarded as the first collegiate a cappella group because they are the oldest continuously existing group (still active today) and have remained
administratively distinct from the university's official choral ensembles,
including the Glee Club.19

Collegiate a cappella has also been influenced in the twentieth century
480
Duchan
by other amateur and commercial vocal genres, which provided collegeage singers with inspiration, models to follow, and vocal innovations to
adopt. Barbershop quartet singing, for example, was a prominent and
popular genre of close-harmony singing beginning around the turn of
the twentieth century. Many of barbershop's social effects, which scholars
such as Gage Averill and Liz Garnett have investigated, can be found in
a cappella practice.20 Musically, much of the Whiffenpoofs' early repertory draws heavily on the barbershop style.21
Instrumental imitation, one of collegiate a cappella's key features, origi-
nated not in barbershop practice, however, but in other, more commercially oriented, vocal genres. For example, the Mills Brothers, one of the
most popular vocal groups of the swing era, made remarkably convincing
vocal imitations of instruments.22 In the 1950s urban street-corner doo-
wop, recorded and made popular by many vocal quartets and quintets,
followed suit. Commercial vocal harmony continued into the 1980s and
1990s, as a cappella hits such as Billy Joel's "The Longest Time" (1983),
Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" (1988), and Boyz II Men's
"It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" (1991) topped the charts and
earned critical recognition.23 These songs appeared during the very period when collegiate a cappella proliferated rapidly on American college
campuses and likely contributed to this expansion (see figure I).24
Most early collegiate a cappella took place at elite institutions in the
northeastern United States. TTiese included the Ivy League schools, which
claimed twenty-six groups (with Yale's eleven more than double any
other of the elite eight), as well as numerous other esteemed institutions
in that part of the country, including Amherst College (DQ, 1926), Williams College (Williams Octet, 1940), Vassar College (Night Owls, 1942),
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Logarhythms, 1949).25
But the number grew dramatically in the late 1980s through the 1990s.
In 1980 there were approximately 110 active groups. These included the
Whiffenpoofs, Spizzwinks(?)26 (1914), and Alley Cats (1943) at Yale as
well as groups like the Smiffenpoofs (Smith College, 1936), the Kingsmen
(Columbia University, 1949), the Friars (University of Michigan, 1955),

the Beelzebubs (Tufts University, 1962), and the Clef Hangers (University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1977). By the end of the 1980s, at least
226 groups existed. The geographic scope began to widen, with groups
established at institutions such as the University of Vermont (Top Cats,
1980), Washington University, St. Louis (Pikers, 1985), York University,
Toronto (Wibijazz'n, 1988), and the University of Georgia (Noteworthy,
1989). Within the next decade, 313 new groups had begun - more in the
period 1990-99 than in the prior eighty-one years. The most new groups
were established in 1996, when forty-six were founded in a single year.
The first five years of the new century show approximately the same
growth rate as the previous decade.
Figure 1. Growth of Collegiate A Cappella, 1909-2005.
Changes in high school music education in the United States had nurtured the growth of collegiate a cappella. The contest movement that
began in Kansas in 1914, for example, enabled school choral ensembles
to participate in organized competitions, stimulating the forming of glee
clubs and granting them respectability. The 1928 meeting of the Music
Supervisors National Conference (MSNC) was dubbed a "singing conference" and featured numerous high school a cappella choir performances and a quartet contest. Between 1928 and 1934 the MSNC hosted
the National High School Chorus. Finally, music publishers realized the
potential of the high school choir market and began advertising in music
education journals.27
By the end of the "a cappella craze" of the 1930s and '40s, unaccompanied choral singing was firmly established in the curriculum. This
continued into the second half of the century, when music educators
increasingly embraced popular music.28 Following the Tanglewood Sym-
posium of 1967, the Music Educators National Conference endorsed

popular music in music education.29 Two years later, in the summer of
1969, the Youth Music Institute was convened at the University of Wisconsin so that high school students could teach popular music styles to
teachers.30 Such events helped lay the foundations for the collegiate a
cappella boom in the '80s and '90s.
But that boom also depended on the integration of male and female
students in American colleges and universities. Early single-sex a cappella groups, such as the Yale Whiffenpoofs and the Smith Smiffenpoofs,
482
Duchan
were founded at single-sex schools. Although some schools with strong

a cappella scenes, such as Stanford University (founded in 1891), were
coeducational from the start, many more became so during the twentieth century. For example, in the Ivy League, Princeton and Yale began to
admit women in 1969, Brown in 1971, Dartmouth and Harvard in 1972,
and Columbia in 1983.31 By early 2007, the College Board listed fiftyone women's, sixty-five men's, and 3,724 coed colleges in its database.32
Not surprisingly then, as figure 1 shows (above), mixed groups lagged
significantly in popularity until the early 1980s; by the mid-1990s they
actually surpassed in number the single-sex groups.
While collegiate a cappella began to grow more rapidly, a new generation of professional a cappella groups emerged, including the Manhattan
Transfer (founded 1972), the Nylons (1979), the Bobs (1982), Rockapella
(1986), Take 6 (1988), the House Jacks (1991), and Five O'Clock Shadow
(1991). These groups provided sounds that served as models for the grow-
ing collegiate scene. A popular PBS television documentary directed by

Spike Lee, Spike & Co.: Do It A Cappella (1990), featured Rockapella, Take
6, and others. It was influential enough to garner praise in the Contemporary A Cappella Newsletter, a publication of the nascent Contemporary
A Cappella Society (CASA), which was founded in 1991 by former Tufts
University Beelzebubs member Deke Sharon.33
Coinciding with the a cappella boom of the 1990s was the rise of the
Internet. E-mail, Usenet discussion boards, and the World Wide Web
became increasingly accessible, especially on college and university campuses where connections were usually fast and efficient. In the early
'90s, a cappella enthusiasts shared messages containing questions, tips,
and discussions of recordings and performances on the Usenet board
rec.music.a-cappella. In 1994 the Recorded A Cappella Review Board

(RARB) began as an on-line archive of a cappella recording reviews, a
critical apparatus for the a cappella community. The website continues
to host a discussion forum to which professional and collegiate singers,
engineers, and other enthusiasts regularly contribute.34
In 1995 Deke Sharon and Adam Farb, a 1994 Brown University graduate, started the annual Best of College A Cappella (BOCA) compilation
albums. Continuing to this day, the BOCA series highlights the "best"
collegiate a cappella recordings each year.35 In 1996 Sharon and Farb
established a live competition, now called the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICC A), which draws college groups from
all regions of the United States and, since 2006, Western Europe. Thus,
between these two competitions, CASA, and RARB, several institutions
emerged over the course of the 1990s that organized and institutionalized collegiate a cappella practice and provided spaces, both physical
and virtual, where music and musical ideas could be shared.
Emulation in A Cappella
In collegiate a cappella, emulation is necessary, though rarely sufficient.
A successful arrangement must preserve important harmonic, rhythmic,
and melodic aspects of a song's commercial recording. An audience's

ability to recognize a song, despite the shift from a vocal and instrumental
pop record to the voices-only medium, does much to determine an arrangement's success and, by extension, a group's as well. Two members
of Company B, a mixed group at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, agreed that arrangements closely mimicking the commercial
recordings help determine a song's success in performance:
jb: The reason that we try to stay so true to the song is so that when we
sing it, it sounds like the song. We want our arrangement to be the song,
just a cappella. You know, we don't want to change it [from] the way
the artist intended it to be. So -
ll: And then the audience really catches onto it jb: Yeah.
ll: - and they really like the way it's just how they heard it on the radio.36
Their language reveals that they are talking about the sound of an artist's
commercial recording. To them, it is obvious that the "song" is the record-
ing, and it needs to be reproduced accurately to satisfy audiences.37

A starting point is transcription, simply notating for voices what is
played by instruments. Anna Callahan, author of the only arranging
manual specifically for collegiate a cappella, proposes a continuum on
which she locates three types of arranging: (1) "transcribing," (2) what
she calls "transanging," and (3) "true arranging." Her language seems
to place the greatest value on the latter:
[Transcribing:] the act of listening to something and writing down
exactly what you hear.

[Transanging:] to convert a song originally played with instrumentation into an a cappella song without substantially changing
the melody, harmonic structure, or style. Transanging often involves
restructuring, simplification, range adjustments, syllable assigning,

and other modifications of the original, but is always replicating the
original version.
[True arranging:] This is the type of arranging that I call "true"
arranging, not because transcribing and transanging aren't useful,
difficult, or creative, but because this type of arranging allows you
the freedom to really express yourself. [Includes dramatic changes
of style, mood, meter, form, and dynamic growth.]38
484
Duchan
Callahan's terminology suggests that emulation alone fails to produce

"true" a cappella, or to allow arrangers and singers "to really express"
themselves. Other practicing a cappella musicians agree. For example,
in 2004, one arranger criticized "strictly imitative charts." He wrote, "I
agree with those . . . who are tired of literal transcriptions of pop tunes.
That's not art, it's math. I don't want to go to math concerts."39
Still, at its core, a cappella is about originality achieved through some
form of emulation. An adequate a cappella arrangement (and performance) sounds like the song's commercial recording. Weinstein would
consider that a cover, albeit with voices only - a significant caveat. But
an excellent arrangement will present the song in a new way that pays
homage to the original while adding something unexpected.
Collegiate a cappella arrangers typically begin the process of arranging
by listening to the song's commercial recording. Only rarely did I hear of
arrangers using commercially published piano and vocal arrangements

as starting points. Occasionally, arrangers download MIDI arrangements
of songs from the Internet to use as models.40 Mostly, however, they lis-
ten closely and repeatedly to a song's original recording and determine

the necessary instrumental parts, chord structures, and other important
distinctive aspects to incorporate into their arrangement.
While some a cappella groups sing commercially available arrangements, most also create their own. Some singers bring considerable musical experience to their group, rendering them fluent in music notation
and/or composition. But a cappella arrangements are different from
other choral arrangements (see below), so some additional instruction is
necessary before these individuals can effectively arrange for their group.
Most arrangers learn by observation; they see, sing, and experience the
arrangements already in their group's repertory and discern their basic
components and effective aspects. However, some groups take a more
active role in training arrangers. In Company B, all first-time arrangers
must partner with an experienced arranger in order to learn the process.
Thus, whether through observation or more explicit pedagogy, arrangers
learn how to be both emulative and original.
One emulative technique involves expanding the number and function
of vocal parts. While many collegiate a cappella arrangements reflect the
standard SATB, SSAA, or TTBB configurations of the traditional Western choral repertory, many others go beyond this, calling for more vocal
lines and a more complex texture. An arrangement of Michael Jackson's
"Human Nature" by VoiceMale, a male group at Brandeis University,
features six background singers, one vocal percussionist, and the lead soloist. Members of VoiceMale take pride in the fact that each sings his own
part. "It doesn't take sixteen people to sing a four-note chord," the group's
music director told me, echoing a motto taught to him by a predecessor.41

That is, once singers are assigned to each necessary chord tone, the others are better used to serve other functions, such as imitating instrumen-
tal riffs from the commercial recording. In VoiceMale's arrangement of

"Human Nature" (see ex. 1), which itself is based on a 2004 Boyz II Men
recording, four voices provide the basic chordal backing and rhythmic
texture (the "acoustic guitar" staves, abbreviated "Ac Gtr"), while another
sings the muted guitar's melodic interjections ("Muted Gtr").

By using more than four parts, the VoiceMale arrangement more effectively mimics the commercial recordings of "Human Nature." (Other
a cappella groups use this technique as well, even if more than one voice
sings each part.) Thus, rather than reducing or adapting a piece to the
standard choral medium as many traditional choral arrangements do, the
goal here is to create a vocal original by expanding the medium itself.
rffti"
-'"I^^GG^vGvUj ^GGûiftfd} ^GtS^GGGÔ iH GG^GG^jUj '
2.:. , pj~'J~r ' i'r 7^ linj'ZJ* y so " '
^ . .... . ^ .. .., ., , .h.

^. *3 . JkS ,- j^ , ;5 ii. y
^,J>^. jfc-H* |J^~; J/v- i u -p4^>
^J: & i. \l 1 si. * P ' '
Example 1. Michael Jackson's "Human Nature," verse. Arranged by Drew Cohen

for Brandeis Univeristy VoiceMale, 2004. Author's transcription based on field
recordings from November 9, 2004.
486
Duchan
Syllables
One of the most distinctive aspects of collegiate a cappella arrangements
is their vocables (called "syllables" by the singers). Before the 1990s, a
cappella groups drew on the familiar palette of syllables from the glee
club, barbershop, and doo-wop. "Doo," "bum," "bop," "wah," and open
vowels such as "ooo," "oh," or "ah" were common. If the song's lyrics
suggested such opportunities, one might occasionally hear a walking
bass, a mimetic "beep-beep" of automobile horns, or a momentary impersonation of brass. Much of the time, however, the ensemble would
sing together as a homophonic unit, harmonizing the song's melody.
For example, most of the twenty-two tracks on the Whiffenpoofs' LP,
The Whiffenpoofs of 1958, feature homophonic ensemble singing, even on
arrangements that include a soloist. At times when soloists do stand out

from the ensemble, the background singers most often sing the syllables
"doo," "bum," or open vowels. (Brass band mimicry can be heard in the
Whiffenpoofs' recording of Rodgers and Hart's "Johnny One Note.")
Throughout the 1980s, a cappella recordings increasingly separated the
background parts from the soloist, with fewer and shorter instances of
background voices harmonizing the melody. Instead, background voices
more often functioned as accompaniment. The purely homorhythmic
texture of earlier records also gave way to more complex rhythms, including broken chords called "bell chords," "pyramids," or "cascades"
in barbershop parlance.42 "Doo" and "ba" continued, however, as the
mainstays of syllable choice. For example, with the exception of one
track (a cover of Mack Gordon and Harry Warren's "Chattanooga ChooChoo"), every song on the University of North Carolina Clef Hangers'
album Safari (1992) features at least one soloist while backgrounds continually use the syllables "doo" and "ba."
An important stylistic shift occurred in the mid-1990s, as groups began
using syllables with a j sound, such as "jun," "jin," "sjun," in order to

more effectively emulate the sound of a guitar strum. It is unclear who
used such syllables first, but "jun" or one of its variants first appears
on the Best of College A Cappella compilation album's second installment
(1996) on tracks recorded in 1994 (the University of Michigan Amazin'
Blue's recording of Mr. Mister's "Kyrie") and 1995 (the University of Vir-
ginia Gentlemen's recording of Billy Pilgrim's "Insomniac"). VoiceMale's

"Human Nature," arranged in 2004, makes extensive use of this; sound
with its syllables "jig-ga jig-ga" and "jen" (see ex. 1 above). Of course, the
spread of "jun" was not immediate - as some groups began using the new
syllables, many others continued with the older syllables - and today's
groups have not abandoned the more traditional syllable options.
When syllables are used to map an instrument's acoustical attack,

timbre, and decay onto a vocally produced sound, the result is some-

thing I call direct emulation. Quick attacks, particularly those of pianos,
are often accomplished with a d sound, such as "dun," "dum," or "den."
Slower attacks, like those of some guitars or synthesizers, might call
for a less percussive consonant, such as /, a "soft /" (fricative), or they
might simply begin with a vowel. The timbre of the syllable is determined by the vowel choice and its placement in the singers' mouths.
With its "hard /'" (affricative) syllables, VoiceMale's arrangement of
"Human Nature" maintains the sparse, percussive quality of the Boyz
II Men version, which relies heavily on plucked and strummed acoustic guitars with short decays. An arrangement of the same song by
the all-male Cornell University Hangovers creates a smoother texture
through the use of sustained chords in the background parts, which
directly emulate the synthesizer sounds of the Michael Jackson recording. However, syllables are sometimes selected to capture or evoke a
"mood" or "feeling" rather than to emulate particular instruments.
This is what I call indirect emulation. By using unusual syllables, indirect emulation maintains an instrumental function without mimicking
a specific instrumental sound.43
On one hand, the increasing use of /-based syllables, which directly
emulate a guitar, suggests a move away from versioning and closer to
covering. On the other, indirect emulation implies a greater emphasis
on versioning than on covering. Thus, the use of syllables in collegiate
a cappella practice shows aspects of both types of musical recontextualization.
Vocal Style
Collegiate a cappella singers make distinct choices regarding vocal style,
choices that can reveal how groups conceive and construct their identities.
The singers I worked with generally avoid vibrato, preferring to sing with
a "straight tone" (sometimes called a "flat tone") while on background

parts. "Vibrato locates the singer within a particular socio-musical field,"
John Potter suggests. Rock singers use it as a "cultivated effect because
of its association with classical singing," and "singers of more middleof-the-road pop music will use a greater or lesser amount of vibrato according to which end of the socio-musical spectrum they wish to identify
with."44 Many singers I encountered use a lack of vibrato to distinguish
themselves and their groups from choirs and glee clubs they perceive as
more "classical." They may also eschew vibrato because of its association, in popular music, with pre-rock singers (like Bing Crosby and Frank
Sinatra) whose cultivated crooning style now sounds old-fashioned to
many younger audiences. And while Potter allows for some use of vibrato
by pop singers, Averill notes its complete banishment from barbershop:
"One requirement for ringing chords was the avoidance of vibrato (which
488
Duchan
would of course vary the pitch and derail any effort to lock the chord).
An article on barbershop style once called vibrato 'poison.'"45
For a cappella singers, the most important vocal concept is blend.
Blended voices are indistinguishable from one another. Like barber-
shoppers, the singers I consulted avoid vibrato because it inhibits a

group's ability to match tone quality and pitch. I was often told of the
value of a singer's ability to blend, and the use of vibrato was heavily criticized in deliberations about new members.46 Historical precedents for a cappella's emphasis on blend can be found in the glee club
tradition (vis-a-vis the straight-tone technique of the early St. Olaf 's
Lutheran Choir), barbershop, the African American quartet tradition,
and doo-wop.47
VoiceMale seeks a particular vocal style that hinges on a strong, loud,
intense timbre. In songs like "Human Nature," the singers avoid not only
vibrato but also falsetto. In my field recordings of VoiceMale's "Human
Nature," the singers "belt" (in chest voice) during the brief introduction
and the chorus but not during the verse, when the listener's attention
focuses on the soloist. This structural use of belting (and volume) emphasizes passages during which the group, not the soloist, should be the
center of attention.
One VoiceMale member explained the group's stylistic preference: "As

part of the power of the sound that we try to put out, we very rarely put
anything in falsetto. If you can hit it, unless it's supposed to be quiet, we
want it powerful, we want it out there."48 Another member of VoiceMale
explained that they want to sound as loud, or louder, with their seven
members as other groups do with seventeen.49 Given VoiceMale's ideal of
one singer per part, it becomes clear that in order to achieve the desired
loud and intense sound while maintaining a balance between the parts,
each individual must sing confidently and loudly enough by himself.
No one else is covering his note; there is no safety in numbers. An untrained falsetto is typically quieter than a male voice in the belt range, so
avoiding falsetto makes sense. It also fits into the ethos of VoiceMale's
identity as projected by their manner of vocal delivery. "Power" is the
key word, applying both to the singer's physical effort and to the identity he projects. As Simon Frith writes, "Even when treating the voice as
an instrument ... it stands for the person more directly than any other
musical device."50 Through its performances, VoiceMale wants to project
masculinity, strength, even domination.
Not all groups share VoiceMale's vocal style or intent. The Treblemakers, a mixed group at Boston University, prefer a more muted, more choral
sound. It is unusual for the group's tenors to belt. Instead, they habitually
switch out of their chest voices and into falsetto whenever they have to
sing in their upper range. In October 2004 1 taught them my arrangement
of Maroon 5's 2002 pop ballad, "She Will Be Loved." During the song's

climactic final chorus, the tenor part splits into two lines. The first tenor
part is high, with sustained notes on G4 and a momentary A-flat 4, and is
intended to indirectly emulate a distorted electric guitar wailing far in the
background. It could have been sung by an alto, yet I wanted to hear the
strain in a tenor's voice, a sort of soaring gesture that would expand the
emotional scope of the song as it entered the final chorus. But the tenors in
the Treblemakers preferred - and ultimately chose - to sing the passage in
falsetto. They placed the sound forward in their vocal cavities, producing
a focused, pointed timbre that came close to, but did not quite achieve,
the effect I wanted. One might surmise that the pitches were simply out
of the singers' range, yet in other songs these same singers could hit those
pitches with the timbre I sought - but only as soloists. This suggests that
it was their preference, not a necessity, to use the falsetto's lighter vocal
quality. In order to blend properly, the Treblemakers avoided singing too
loudly or in a manner that would vary significantly in timbre from that
of the rest of the group. What was essentially a musical choice - how to
produce vocal sounds within a particular pitch range - ended up following a habitual pattern that helped define the group's sound.
Vocal Percussion
"Vocal percussion" refers to singers emulating the sounds of a drum set.51
The most basic vocal percussion mimics kick and snare drums. Singers usually emulate the kick drum with the syllables "doo" or "doom,"
placed low in the vocal range. They commonly make a snare drum sound
with a "kh" or a "pf." These sounds, along with "ts" for hi-hats and ride
cymbals, and "ksh" or "psh" for crash cymbals, can be combined with
rhythmic breathing into patterns that approximate those played on a rock
kit. Even if the sounds of vocal percussion, when isolated, do not convinc-
ingly imitate those of actual drums, professional vocal percussionist Wes

Carroll explained, they can still assume the function of the drums when
they are performed in the right rhythmic patterns.52
"Vocal percussion" (sometimes abbreviated as "VP"), "beatboxing,"

and other terms are often used interchangeably. There is some question
within the a cappella community about the relationship of vocal percussion to beatboxing and other vocal techniques that aim to provide a
nonpitched rhythm, such as "mouth drumming" and "multivocalism." In
hip-hop, beatboxing may be an integral part of a cipher, a "street performative" in which a group of MCs, usually standing in a circle, take turns
improvising rhymes while accompanied by beatboxing or a prerecorded

beat.53 When the question was posed on the RARB's discussion forum,
one respondent contrasted a cappella singing with rap, a practice within
which vocalized percussive sounds have been a feature since at least the
early 1970s.54 He called a cappella's vocal percussion the "imitation of
490
Duchan
existing drum sounds" and rap's beatboxing the "art of creating beats
with one's voice," regardless of whether the sounds mimic extant drums
(acoustic or synthesized).55 Another contributor drew the distinction in
terms of timbre, with vocal percussion "brighter" because, when amplified, the microphone is usually a short distance from the mouth (allowing some sonic reflections to be picked up in addition to the primary
source sound), and beatboxing "darker" because practitioners hold a

microphone against their lips and cover the capsule with their hands.56
A third contributor noted that beatboxing, while initially accompanying
rap, has evolved into a solo or group art form.57 This stands in contrast
to vocal percussion, which always accompanies a group of singers. Thus,
the differences between these related terms depend both on the differing
sounds of the two practices and their function in the musical texture.
During performances, bodily gestures make clear the instruments
being imitated vocally, from "air-drums" to "air-guitars." It is especially common to see vocal percussionists make drumming gestures.
(See figures 2 and 3 for examples of instrumental gestures in a cappella
performances.) Some performers believe that such bodily gestures actually improve the sound and make for more convincing performances
and recordings.58
Figure 2. Vocal percussion gestures (L).

New York University APC Rhythm at
Yale University, March 26, 2005. Photo
by the author.
Figure 3. Miming guitars, SUNY-Binghamton Crosbys performing at Yale

University, March 26, 2005. Photo by
the author.

Texture
When a cappella arrangers adapt a pop record in an arrangement, they

usually maintain a lead-and-accompaniment texture. This helps to distinguish collegiate a cappella from barbershop and glee clubs while aligning
it with doo-wop.59 In a cappella practice, however, background parts use
textural and gestural devices to ensure that they remain simply "background." Certain arranging techniques draw attention to the background
parts or to important structural or harmonic moments. They also provide variety for the singers themselves, who welcome such moments of
change. After all, most songs have only one soloist, so most singers spend
much of their time singing (often repetitive) background parts.

One critical background technique is what VoiceMale calls a "bell," a
term derived from barbershop that describes the effect of voices entering
in succession to form a chord. In "Human Nature," the background ostinato comprises rhythmically identical, but offset and overlapping, duets
(see ex. 1, "Ac Gtr" staves, above). Bells occur in the first and second
endings of the verse (ex. 1, mm. 7-8, 9-10) and mimic the guitar figures
in the Boyz II Men recording. These nearly identical two-measure passages function as transitions between the harmonic patterns of the verse
(IV-V-I6) and the chorus (IV-V-I-V6-vi-V, beginning at "Why," m. 11). They
also provide a textural change from overlapping homorhythms to arpeggiated chords, signaling a formal transition and hinting at the upcoming
repeat of the verse (or the downbeat of the chorus). The rhythmic and
melodic shift from an ostinato to a transitional figure creates a moment
of interest as well as a challenge: interest because there is something new
to sing, and challenge because these passages require precise rhythmic
coordination and close listening. (Rehearsing these bells often took the
better part of a two- or three-hour rehearsal.)
Originality in A Cappella
While emulation is an important stylistic goal in collegiate a cappella,
many groups also strive to inject originality into their music, taking the
a cappella song beyond just "equal" to the commercial recording and

instead "surpassing" it. VoiceMale's use of bells in the background parts
of "Human Nature" is one example. That technique kept singers (and
listeners) interested, challenged, and happily engaged with the music.
But there are other techniques that achieve the same objective: musical
quotation, formal expansion, textural variation, the sharing of melodic
material across voice parts, and a soloist's reinterpretation of a song's
lead, to name only the most common. The first two techniques explicitly
change the song through the introduction of new musical material. The
492
Duchan
other three can be used in the pursuit of a cappella's overall emulative

goal or as ways to bring a new interpretation to a song. In addition, all
of these techniques can have social implications.
Musical quotation is a technique for referencing other songs within an
arrangement.60 Sometimes other material by the same recording artist
is borrowed; an arranger might use lyrics from one song as background
syllables to another song. At other times he or she may quote an entirely
different musical source, with arrangement and source having only a

common harmonic framework. In their recording of "Let Me Entertain
You," recorded by British rocker Robbie Williams in 1997, VoiceMale
quotes Steppenwolf 's 1968 classic, "Magic Carpet Ride." A second soloist sings the Steppenwolf lyrics ("close your eyes girl, look inside girl,
let the sound take you away") while impersonating the raspy quality of
that song's lead. At the quotation's introduction, all background rhythmic activity ceases, allowing the listener to focus entirely on the Steppenwolf interpolation with a backing of block chords. Then the Williams
song's refrain ("let me entertain you") returns in the primary soloist's
voice while the Steppenwolf lyrics continue more quietly as a featured
harmony line. The result is not a Williams-Steppenwolf medley, but a
brief reference to the second song that folds into the fabric of the first.
The prevalence of musical allusions in collegiate a cappella suggests

not only the playfulness of the genre but also an appreciation of intertex-
tuality's complexity. Whether or not the audience recognizes the quotation and appreciates its significance depends partly on how apparent it
is, on whether it is executed by a soloist (making a direct and apparent
association with the secondary song) or only within the background
parts (remaining "insider knowledge," a feat of musical fusion of which
the singers, themselves, are proud but that remains mostly hidden to
listeners).
A related technique is the changing of a song's form by adding new,
rather than borrowed, musical material. For example, an arranger from
Amazin' Blue added a new, quasi-scat section to the Sting song "If I
Ever Lose My Faith in You" that features the group without a soloist.
Each background part enters separately, as if announcing not only its
presence but also its independence from the other parts. So doing, this
technique features the background singers for a musical moment before
returning to the song's original form and focus on the soloist. Also, by
basing this new section on the cyclic iii-i progression of the song's coda
and by avoiding the introduction of new lyrics, this technique allows
the formal expansion to emerge from the song organically rather than
seem imposed from the outside.
Unexpected textural variations reveal flashes of originality because
they disrupt the relationship between the lead and its accompaniment.

Since the 1990s, the a cappella style has drawn a fundamental distinction between the role of lead soloist and background singer through
the articulation of words: the former may do so, while the latter usually does not. One potent technique used to create textural variation
is the sparing but striking use of the whole group as a homophonic
choir. After spending most of a song singing instrumentally functioning background syllables, having the entire group explode, fortissimo,
with dense harmonies along with the soloist, singing the same lyrics at
the same time, creates a dramatic statement.61 The effect weakens the
lead /accompaniment dichotomy and affects the song's narrative force.
No longer does the lead singer carry the lyrical content alone. Instead,
his or her voice is now, in effect, as powerful as the group's combined
voices. This "momentary choir" technique is prevalent in the a cappella
repertory, though related variation techniques also abound: passages
during which the basses drop out (leading to a distinct change in texture
and the opportunity to make a musical event out of the bass section's
return) and other moments of marked contrast between polyphonic and
homophonic passages, to name two examples.
Singers value passages in which two or more parts sing parallel melodic lines or when they coordinate, often antiphonally, to create a single
melodic line. Consider such a melodic exchange during the "instrumental" section of the Treblemakers' arrangement of Rufus Wainwright's
"Instant Pleasure" (see ex. 2). The altos begin with the guitar-emulating
melody ("bair ner ner . . .") which is answered a measure later with an
arpeggio articulated by the tenors, altos, and sopranos. After this figure
repeats, the harmony changes (from I-V-IV to the double-plagal I-flat
VH-IV-flat Ill-flat VII6-I) and the tenors seize the melody before the sopranos finish the phrase. Creating a single melodic line fosters visual
and aural communication and, of course, enhances the performance's
social dimension.
Finally, the personal prerogative of the soloist offers a prime vehicle

for originality. He or she need not simply imitate the recording artist's
performance (although, as I have said, some fidelity to the commercial
recording is fundamental to a cappella's emulative goal). Small melodic
or timbral - or even visual - variations allow soloists to give their performance "its own personality," as one singer from Company B put it.62
This idea aligns with George Plaskete's writing on the process of covering, which he describes as an "adaptation, in which much of the value
lies in the artists' interpretation." In this recontextualization, "Measuring
the interpreter's skill, in part, lies in how well the artist uncovers and
conveys the spirit of the original, enhances the nuances of its melody,
rhythm, phrasing, or structure, maybe adding a new arrangement, sense
of occasion or thread of irony."63
494
Duchan
j4-*- 4_______y__
!
>kh>
iflja
***
buir
nvr
j:
ikt
nor
nt-r
nrr
ikt
tl<n>m
d>m
#*f
pfa r ' -"" jr : T~~l

lîMtfii t>tnnTi Ixmrn txMnn Hitom Him tin hnntni StMHn HiMini hnniiii tiixxn n*Km K*H>m
l#!
^__-
ixh>
ii.H.in
bah
K>h
ik
dv
lw>iii Vh^mii tHKrrv HiH>m bHôfii t^H>m Vh^hm txîm hnn^ni tnîrn Ih^tti Wn*rn tv>oni tux^m H<h>iii Iwm tvnirrt Htôn^
JlTT"""
"
Kth
Ai4%''"
3'
"
~~~~~ZZZ-:-,
b.ih
"*
bah
8^
ikhi
.>i
bjir
iv
n.-r
ner
iwir
bah
^,_
oh.
.>.>
a.ih
?**:-;
Example 2. Rufus Wainwright's "Instant Pleasure," instrumental section. Arranged for the Boston University Treblemakers by Dave Ransom. Note: the top
staff contains additional harmonies.
Beyond Emulation and Originality:

Social Motivations for Stylistic Goals
What motivates collegiate a cappella's stylistic goals? Part of the answer
lies in the social implications of the musical choices arrangers and singers
make. While emulation and originality, and covering and versioning, entail particular techniques, much of the music's meaning also derives from
the ways in which singers and audiences experience those techniques.

Emulating popular recordings and quoting one song within another
give audiences something familiar. But how each a cappella group de-

ploys familiar material helps to determine its success in performance.
In the crowded arena of student activities, a cappella groups must compete with each other (and with other student clubs) for resources, both
financial and human. A repertory of covers also constrains and con-
ventionalizes expression: the audience already knows how the song

goes, so the thrill comes from how the group will do it in a new, vocalonly medium. Moreover, a song performed by an a cappella group is
often not immediately recognizable based on the first few measures
of its introduction (as, admittedly, may also be the case with the original commercial recording). Typically audience members may have to
wait a few seconds until a recognizable melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic
snippet - the song's hook, perhaps - is sung before recognizing which
song is actually being performed. (In my research, concert programs
only rarely listed the titles of the songs to be performed. Recognition is
therefore based entirely on aural perception.) In performance, then, a
cappella groups enable a pleasurable sense of discovery as audiences

identify familiar songs.64
Although some groups collect dues from their members, ticket and
album sales make up the bulk of most groups' revenues (in my research,
most groups rarely found their school administrations to be sufficient
sources of funding). Sales thus become the main enablers of the group's
music duplication, travel expenses, future concerts, and recording projects. Especially on campuses where a cappella thrives, the perception
of a diluted talent pool as well as a heightened intergroup competition
intensifies the search for new singers. A group must ensure its continued
survival and success by attracting and training show-stopping soloists,

skilled arrangers, and future leaders through its performances. Every
time it performs a popular or familiar song, or quotes another song in
an arrangement, it not only shows off the skills of its arrangers, but also
creates an opportunity for connection with potential members.

Many of the techniques a cappella groups use to add originality to
their music also function "democratically" to share the spotlight among
multiple singers. A cappella is a voluntary activity, and members have to
feel valued in order to participate. As one singer told me, "you can sing
doo's and da's only so long before it stops feeling fulfilling."65 When a
group "gives" a member the spotlight (e.g., a solo), the other singers believe that that member has the best voice for that song or part and have
confidence in his or her ability to execute it successfully on their behalf.
Most groups determine each song's lead soloist by holding internal auditions, judged by those members not auditioning. In some groups, an
important factor in this audition process is whether any of the candidates
sing solos on other songs in the group's repertory (or if any do not sing
other solos). Simon Frith's metonymic treatment of the voice/instrument
as the person is instructive here. With a share of the spotlight comes the
496
Duchan
social implication that the individual's voice is important - not only as

a singing voice but as a person.
The value that a cappella singers place on the individual voice, and
the identity implied by that voice, also speaks to the sociability of the
musical practice. By presenting several individuals as soloists, an a cappella group can access a larger social network in its audience. As VoiceMale's music director explained: "If everybody has a solo, the audience
gets to feel like they've met everybody, and that's a better performance.
That makes them feel closer to you than if two people are singing all the
solos and the rest of the guys are just faceless, nameless guys in the back
singing 'doo-wop, doo-wop.'"66 And while featuring each member in a

group's performance accesses each individual's social network and thus
betters sales of tickets and albums, it also enables the accumulation and
display of social capital by singers.
The economics of time also play an important role. Like earlier student
vocal ensembles, a cappella groups are active components of campus

musical life. They sing at many of the same official functions as did their
predecessors, fostering a broader sense of school spirit. But each singer

has many other obligations - academic and social commitments, family
needs, religious practice, and so forth. These activities may conflict with
those related to a cappella, such as arranging, rehearsing, performing,
business correspondence, and the maintenance of proper relationships
with other campus groups, funding sources, and the college administration. When I asked singers what they gained from their experience
in an a cappella group, the most common answer, after the creation of
community, was better time-management skills.
One might think of a cappella participation as a cost-and-rewards phenomenon, implying a sort of psychological ledger by which individuals
determine whether they are sufficiently satisfied with their experience.
Robert A. Stebbins takes this approach to barbershop singing and finds
the prominent rewards to be personal enrichment, the enjoyment of sing-
ing, and self-actualization; the most common costs are disappointments

in competitions, dislike of group leadership, and frustration with varying
levels of commitment among other singers.67 These conclusions apply to

a cappella, but as an explanatory tool this calculation must be more nuanced. For each individual - whether he or she stays with the group or
leaves it - the weights of the various costs and rewards differ. Perhaps
more than other factors, the sharing of the spotlight (and the implied
value of individual voices) strongly affects a cappella singers' decisions
to remain with a group.
But sharing the spotlight also allows singers to tap into the powerful
cultural archetype of the "rock star" - a figure with considerable social
capital (especially in youth culture). For many, a cappella is simply fun;
there is a certain pleasure in the creation of a virtuosic or spectacular

vocal-only rendition of a familiar musical icon. But beneath the pleasure
of performance may lie the process Simon Frith and R. J. Warren Zanes
call "identification." This occurs when a fan (or fanatic) either desires
the popular artist or desires to be the popular artist and then enacts that
desire through mimicry.68 As one a cappella singer told me:

Every girl secretly wants to be like Britney Spears. You see someone
dance - and I'm not saying risque - but you see someone be so confident and dance like that and sing and really belt it out, and have
so much energy, and you're just like, "I want to be like that." And,
"if I join that group, I will be."69
The vocal techniques and bodily gestures that singers perform facilitate
identification. They enable the singer to assume a rock star's persona or
to act like the rock star playing his or her instrument. Moreover, through
direct emulation, syllables and gestures enable the singer to be the rock
star's instrument.
Collegiate a cappella is founded on the act of recontextualizing commercial recordings in a vocal medium. Many of a cappella's stylistic
goals build on this foundation. Both emulation and originality (combined with social needs and opportunities) shape collegiate a cappella's
distinctive sound. A cappella thus steers a narrow path between two
forms of musical mimicry that Weinstein describes: "covers" (iterations
of particular performances) and "versions" (iterations of the underlying
composition).
At the same time, a cappella challenges that dichotomy because it
emulates particular performances of songs (recordings) while simultaneously denying the very instruments used in those performances. On one
hand, it may be simple to say that a cappella consists more of versions
than of covers. Yet when an a cappella group strives to recreate aspects
of a particular recording - such as VoiceMale's arrangement of "Human
Nature," whose guitar lines appear in the Boyz II Men version of the
Michael Jackson song but not in Jackson's recording - a Weinsteinian
view would describe the group as aspiring to a cover. On the other hand,
some techniques of originality, such as interplay between background
parts or înterpretations of the lead melody, seem to distinguish an a
cappella song from a cover. Yet because they alter basic building blocks
of the piece, other common techniques of originality, such as musical
quotation and formal expansion, undermine the case for a cappella as
version. Clearly the categories break down in this relatively recent and
so far little-discussed genre.
While popular recordings certainly underlie the a cappella repertory,
the cover/version dichotomy, or other schemes that separate the act of
musical recontextualization by reference or intention, cannot adequately
describe the a cappella approach to making music. More important, such
498
Duchan
theoretical distinctions fail to account for the social aspects of musical

practice. I have highlighted several of these, each with musical ramifications: featuring familiar repertory and multiple soloists, fostering a sense
of musical community and self-worth, and presenting opportunities to

accumulate and display social capital. The case of collegiate a cappella - a
genre to which more critical attention will need to be paid as time goes
on - demonstrates some of the ways social considerations affect musical
choices and, ultimately, determine the music's meaning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music in March 2005, at the Midwest chapter meeting of the American Musicological
Society in October 2005, and in my dissertation. I am grateful to Judith Becker, Richard
Crawford, Mark Clague, James Wierzbicki, and Albin Zak, along with the anonymous
reviewers, for their guidance, critique, and suggestions during the writing process. I must
also thank the musicians with whom I worked, including the members of Brandeis University Company B and VoiceMale, the Boston University Treblemakers, the Harvard
University Fallen Angels, the University of Michigan Amazin' Blue, and the University
of Pennsylvania Counterparts for sharing their lives, thoughts, and music with me. Of
course, I retain full responsibility for any inaccuracy of representation.
NOTES
1. For example: Kurt Eichewald, "'Doo-Wop-a-Doo' Will No Longer Do," New York Times,
June 22, 1997, sec. 2, p. 32; Karen W. Arenson, "Songsters Off on a Spree: Campuses Echo
with the Sound of Enthusiastic A Cappella Groups," New York Times, April 25, 2002, El, 4;
"Profile: Yale's A Cappella Groups Rush Current Crop of Freshmen," NPR Radio Morning
Edition, Sept. 9, 2002; "A Cappella Frenzy," CBS News Sunday Morning, Jan. 11, 2004; Rachel
Baker, "These Are the Biggest Studs On Campus?," Boston Magazine, February 2007. The
estimate of a thousand groups comes from the CBS News story.
2. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), s.v.
"emulation."
3. On barbershop, see Lynn Abbott, "Tlay That Barber Shop Chord': A Case for the
African- American Origin of Barbershop Harmony," American Music 10, no. 3 (1992): 289-325;
Gage Averill, Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Liz Garnett, "Ethics and Aesthetics: The Social Theory
of Barbershop Harmony," Popular Music 18, no. 1 (1999): 41-61, and The British Barbershopper:
A Study in Socio-Musical Values (Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2005); Max Kaplan, ed., Barbershopping: Musical and Social Harmony (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1993); Richard Mook, "The Sounds of Liberty: Nostalgia, Masculinity, and Whiteness in
Philadelphia Barbershop, 1900-2003," Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
2004; and Robert A. Stebbins, The Barbershop Singer: Inside the Social World of a Musical Hobby
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). Barbershop quartet singing does have a presence on college campuses, and is supported by the Barbershop Harmony Society (formerly
SPEBSQSA) through its national competition, the MBNA America Collegiate Barbershop
Quartet Contest, founded in 1990. In my field research, however, I found barbershop quartets
largely absent from the music scenes of the colleges at which I worked.

4. On doo-wop, see Stuart L. Goosman, "The Black Atlantic: Structure, Style, and Values
in Group Harmony/' Black Music Research Journal 17, no. 1 (1997): 81-99; Anthony J. Gribin
and Matthew M. Schiff, Doo-Wop: The Forgotten Third of Rock 'n Roll (Iola, Wis.: Krause, 1992);
Philip Groia, They All Sang on the Corner: New York City's Rhythm and Blues Vocal Groups of
the 1950s (Setauket, N.Y.: Edmond Publishing Co., 1974); and Robert Pruter, Doowop: The
Chicago Scene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
5. Little scholarly work has been done on the history of college glee clubs or their contemporary manifestations, although the topic receives some attention in Christopher Bruhn,
"Taking the Private Public: Amateur Music-Making and the Musical Audience in 1860s
New York/' American Music 21, no. 3 (2003): 260-90; Ellistine Perkins Holly, "Black Concert
Music in Chicago, 1890 to the 1930s," Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1990): 141^19;
and Walter Raymond Spalding, Music at Harvard: A Historical Review of Men and Events (New
York: Coward-McCann, 1935). For a recent first-person account of the college glee club, see
Bruce Montgomery, Brothers, Sing On!: My Half-Century Around the World with the Venn Glee
Club (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

6. David Horn, "Some Thoughts on the Work in Popular Music," in The Musical Work:
Reality or Invention?, ed. Michael Talbot (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 30.
7. Deena Weinstein, "The History of Rock's Pasts through Rock Covers," in Mapping the
Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, ed. Thomas Swiss, John Sloop, and Andrew
Herman (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1988), 138.
8. Serge Lacasse, "Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music," in

The Musical Work, ed. Talbot, 46. Some forms of covering would fall into Lacasse's category
of "hypertextuality," which is defined as "practices which aim at producing a new text

out of a previous one" (37).
9. This article deals with arranging and performance practice from the perspective of
collegiate a cappella practitioners. It does not address recording, a process in which both
emulation and originality play a key role. For more on a cappella recording practice,
see Joshua S. Duchan, "Powerful Voices: Performance and Interaction in Contemporary
Collegiate A Cappella," (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2007), 119-22,
243-301. The subject of arranging has borne a sizable library of instructional texts, particularly from the perspectives of orchestration, choral arranging, and jazz, many of which
draw heavily on the Western classical tradition for their principles and examples. See, for
example, Glenn Miller, Glenn Miller's Method for Orchestral Arranging (New York: Mutual
Music Society, 1943); Hawley Ades, Choral Arranging (Delaware Gap, Pa.: Shawnee Press,
Inc., 1966); and David Baker, Arranging and Composing for the Small Ensemble: Jazz, R&B,
Jazz-Rock (Chicago: Maher, 1970). Scholarly perspectives on arranging can be found, for
example, in Evelyn Howard-Jones, "Arrangements and Transcriptions," Music & Letters
16 (1935): 305-11; Norman Carrell, Bach the Borrower (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967);
Hans Keller, "Arrangement For or Against?," Musical Times 110, no. 1511 (1969): 22-25; and
Millan Sachania, "'Improving the Classics': Some Thoughts on the 'Ethics' and Aesthetics
of Musical Arrangement," The Music Review 55, no. 1 (1994): 58-75.
10. Those capacities include arranger, performer, director, producer, and competition
adjudicator. My introduction to collegiate a cappella came in high school, when a group
visiting from Northwestern University conducted a clinic with the school choir and gave
a brief after-school concert. I joined a mixed group as a sophomore in college and another
during my graduate studies. I then conducted ethnographic fieldwork during the 2004-5
academic year with groups in the Boston area (primarily with Brandeis University VoiceMale, the Boston University Treblemakers, and the Harvard University Fallen Angels),
consisting of observations and interviews, as well as some participation and coaching.
11. Although the topic of collegiate a cappella remains off the musicological map, it
has been well covered by undergraduate and graduate students in term papers and
theses. Those that I have been able to locate include: Judah Cohen, "'Beautiful Stories,
500
Duchan
Told in Some Very Melodic Ways': An Ethnography of Under Construction, HarvardRadcliffe's Christian A Cappella Singing Group/' (graduate ethnomusicology paper,
Harvard University, Cambridge, 1997); Jason Chua, "Wolverine Vocals: Detailing the
History, Function, and Racial Homogeneity of A Cappella Groups in the University of
Michigan," (undergraduate musicology paper, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2005);
Ben Jackson, "Vocal Percussion: A Phonetic Description," (bachelor's thesis, Harvard
University, Cambridge, 2001); Mark Manley, "ROOM ZERO: The Dialectical Worlds of
Live Performance and the Recording Studio in Collegiate A Cappella," (bachelor's thesis,
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2002); Jane Alexander Mclntosh, "In Harmony: A
Look at the Growth of Collegiate A Cappella Groups and the Future of the Movement,"
(master's thesis, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, 1999); Rebecca Reiman, (untitled undergraduate anthropology paper, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.,
2005); Veronica L. S. Robinson, "University of Michigan A Cappella Group Pre-Concert
Traditions," (undergraduate folklore paper, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2005);
Stacey Street, "Voices of Womanhood: Gender Ideology and Musical Practice in American
Women's Vocal Groups," (bachelor's thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge, 1990); and
Jack Wilkinson, (untitled music thesis, bachelor's thesis, Bowdoin College, 2005).
12. Alan Clark Buechner, Yankee Singing Schools and the Golden Age of Choral Music in New
England, 1760-1800 (Boston: Boston University Scholarly Publications, 2003), 108-9.

13. Richard Kegerreis, "The Handel Society of Dartmouth," American Music 4, no. 2
(1986): 177-93. The Handel Society was formed after visit to the college by psalmody reformer Andrew Law. Its petition for recognition states that the Society sought "to improve
and cultivate the taste and promote true and genuine music" through a European repertory
(quoted in ibid., 178).

14. Spalding, Music at Harvard, 39-109; Michael Broyles, "Music of the Highest Class":
Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 130.
15. Marshall Bartholomew, "The First 100 Years, 1861-1961: A Short History of the Yale
Glee Club," unpublished manuscript, Marshall Bartholomew Papers, MSS 24, Box 3, Folder
1, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University.
16. Spalding, Music at Harvard, 54, 120. Boston critic John Sullivan Dwight praised its
first performance, on June 9, 1858, for its "admirable blending, light and shade, etc." ("College Music," Dwight's Journal of Music, June 19, 1858, quoted in Spalding, Music at Harvard,
76-77).
17. The History of the University of Michigan Men's Glee Club, available on the UMMGC
website (http://www.umich.edu/~ummgc) (n.p., 2003), accessed Nov. 11, 2005, 1; Spalding, Music at Harvard, 131. Spalding, along with Jon Newsom's article on Davison in The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (s.v. "Davison, A. T"), credits Davison with
introducing "serious music" to the Harvard Glee Club, and to American college choral
societies more generally.
18. Marshall Bartholomew, "Singing for the Fun of It," unpublished manuscript, Marshall
Bartholomew Papers, MSS 24, Box 4, Folder 1, 163A, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale
University. Groups at Yale from the 1840s and later in the nineteenth century included the
Cecilias, the Beethoven Bummers (a play on the more serious Beethoven Society), the Owls,
the Four Sharps, the Midnight Caterwaulers, and the Theologians.
19. The Black Sheep (also known as the Six Little Lambs) sang briefly at Yale around the
turn the twentieth century, followed by the Growlers, a group whose membership included
singers who would later found the Whiffenpoofs. The group's name refers to comedian
Joseph Cawthorne's performance in the Broadway production of Victor Herbert's Little
Nemo (1908), during which he mused about catching a "whiffenpoof fish." For more on the
Whiffenpoofs, see Richard Nash Gould, Yale 1900-2001, vol. 2, The Whiffenpoofs: Twentieth
Century (New York: The Twentieth Century Project, LLC, 2004), and James M. Howard,
"An Authentic Account of the Founding of the Whiffenpoofs," printed in the booklet, "A

History of the Whiffenpoofs of Yale University and a Roster of Membership: Prepared for
the 85th Anniversary Celebration, April 29-May 1, 1994, New Haven, Connecticut," in RU
156, Ascension 2000-A-044, Box 1, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.
20. For example, in Four Parts, No Waiting, Averill discusses barbershop's practice of
"collective audition/' in which bodily and social relationships intersect (p. 178). In "Ethics
and Aesthetics: The Social Theory of Barbershop Harmony," Garnett examines barbershoppers' concept of harmony as a metaphor for social cohesion, an egalitarian ideal, and the
performance of "maximum inclusiveness," and in The British Barbershopper she explores
the social effects of barbershop competitions and behavioral codes (pages 43, 50, 59-62,
75-78). Both scholars also consider the social implications of the concept of blend.
21. Gould calls the Whiffenpoofs' style from 1909-49 the "barbershop style." It was
marked by four-part arrangements, relatively few solos, and musical sources such as vaudeville, burlesque, college songs, and spirituals. As with barbershop practice, the melody
line was most often in the second tenor part, and harmonies and rhythms were of rather
simple and straightforward construction. Gould, The Whiffenpoofs: Twentieth Century, 65.
22. The Mills Brothers, from Piqua, Ohio, consisted of brothers Herbert (1912-89), Harry
(1913-1982), Donald (b. 1915), and John Mills, Jr. (1911-35). Although secularized, their
style drew on a longstanding tradition of black religious vocal music stretching at least
as far back as the jubilee choruses of the mid-nineteenth century and later popular gospel
quartets (such as the Golden Gate Quartet). They began singing together about 1922 and
in 1929 became the first black ensemble to receive official commercial sponsorship by a
major network, CBS. Among their early successes was a version of the Original Dixieland
Jazz Band's "Tiger Rag," which they recorded multiple times in October 1931 and again in
1932 for the soundtrack to the film The Big Broadcast (1932); the recordings appear on The
Mills Brothers: Chronological, Vol. 1 (London: JSP Records, JSPCD 301, 1988). "Tiger Rag"
features a tuba-like bass tone and a remarkably convincing vocalized muted trumpet. As
proof of just how convincing their instrumental imitations were, the label of their early
recordings read: "no musical instruments or mechanical devices used on this recording
other than one guitar" (Geoff Milne, liner notes to The Mills Brothers: Chronological, vol.
1). For more on the Mills Brothers, see Mitch Rosalsky, Encyclopedia of Rhythm and Blues
and Doo-Wop Vocal Groups (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000), 397; and Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 51.
Another early example of vocal imitations of instrumental sounds is the German sextet
the Comedian Harmonists. Active in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the group inspired a
feature film, Comedian Harmonists (1997). For more information on the ensemble, see Peter
Czada and Giinter Grosse, Comedian Harmonists: Ein Vokalensemble erobert die Welt (Berlin:
Edition Hentrich, 1993); for analyses of the film, see Lutz Koepnick, "Refraining the Past:
Heritage Cinema and the Holocaust in the 1990s," New German Critique 87 (2002): 47-82,
and "'Honor Your German Masters': History, Memory, and National Identity in Joseph
Vilsmaier's Comedian Harmonists (1997)," in Light Motives: New Directions in German Film
Studies, ed. Margaret McCarthy and Randall Halle (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
2003), 349-75.
23. Also notable is Todd Rundgren's 1985 album, A Capella (Warner Bros. 9251281), which,
like McFerrin's work, was recorded entirely a cappella using extensive multitracking. The
album reached number 128 on the Billboard Top 200, far below the spots reached by Joel's,
McFerrin's, and Boyz II Men's recordings.
24. The chart in figure 1 is based on survey data I collected between January 2006 and
January 2007 in an attempt to determine the number of collegiate a cappella groups in
existence, their schools and founding dates, and whether they were male, female, or mixed
ensembles. The survey included groups mostly in the United States as well as a few in
Canada and the United Kingdom. It was decidedly unscientific and I make no claim to
its statistical validity. I began with an old directory supplied by Don Goodine (of the
502
Duchan
Mainely A Cappella company), which itself was based on contact lists compiled by Deke
Sharon and the Tufts University Beelzebubs in the early 1990s. I then consulted one of
the largest on-line directories (http://www.collegeacappella.com) and the "Acapedia"
administered by the Contemporary A Cappella Society on its website (http://www.casa.
org) to verify as much information as possible. When links were provided, I followed
them to groups' websites, which often contained relevant data. In cases where I could not
verify a group's existence, I did not add it to Gooding's and Sharon's original lists. This
process of information-gathering, and my own recollections of names and anecdotes from
my field research, comprised the primary method of data collection; it would have been
impractical to contact each group directly to verify the data.
25. As the Men's Octet (University of California at Berkeley, 1948), the Virginia Gentlemen
(University of Virginia, 1953), and the Mendicants (Stanford University, 1962) demonstrate,
a cappella groups did exist elsewhere, but not with the same geographic concentration as
in the northeast.
26. The parenthetical question mark in "Spizzwinks(?)" is in fact part of the group's
name. According to the group's history, the parenthetical mistakenly accompanied the
name the first time it appeared in print in the Yale Banner in 1914. Amused, the group
decided to retain it. (Spizzwinks(?) website, history page, http://www.yale.edu/spizzwin/ history/, accessed Sept. 6, 2007.)
27. James A. Keene, A History of Music Education in the United States (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 1982), 319-28. See also Leonard Van Camp, "The Rise
of American Choral Music and the A Cappella 'Bandwagon,'" Music Educators Journal 67,
no. 3 (1980): 36^0.
28. Keene, History of Music Education, 353-63. See also Michael L. Mark and Charles L.
Gary, A History of American Music Education (New York: Schirmer, 1992), 364-65.
29. "The Tanglewood Declaration," Music Educators Journal 54, no. 3 (1967): 51.
30. For a detailed report on the Institute, see Wiley L. Housewright, Emmett R. Sarig,
Thomas MacCluskey, and Allan Hughes, "Youth Music: A Special Report," Music Educators
Journal 56, no. 3 (1969): 43-74.
31. The two remaining Ivy League schools were coeducational much earlier: Cornell
University was coed from its founding in 1865 (although female students did not enroll
until 1872), while the University of Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1740, became
coed in 1876.
32. The College Board website, http://www.collegeboard.com (accessed March 2, 2007).

The College Board administers the SAT and other college entrance exams, and provides
high school students with information regarding colleges and universities.
33. Contemporary A Cappella Newsletter 2, no. 4 (April 1992): 13. The documentary's sound-
track was inducted into the Contemporary A Cappella Society's Contemporary A Cappella
Recording Awards "hall of fame" for its demonstration of "the richness of a cappella's
past and the vitality of its future to a completely new audience
album to represent contemporary a cappella to someone who's never heard a note," the
editor wrote, "this would be the one." When it was founded, CAS A served mostly college
groups and adopted Sharon's College A Cappella Newsletter, first published in October 1990,
as its organ. The Society quickly expanded its purview to include semiprofessional and
professional a cappella groups, and in 1990 the newsletter was renamed the Contemporary
A Cappella Newsletter. Selected issues are available on the Contemporary A Cappella Society
website: http://www.casa.org.
34. The Recorded A Cappella Review Board's website can be found at: http://www.
rarb.org. Recording engineer Bill Hare emphasized the importance of the Internet in a cap-
pella's growth: "While people like Deke [Sharon], Don [Gooding], and myself were doing
pioneering things independently of each other, I cannot stress enough the role that the
invention and use of the Internet had during this time, several years after our independent

groundwork. If it weren't for this new form of instant information gathering, most groups
would have remained islands unto themselves - I know the Stanford groups for the most
part didn't know there were any other groups out there before this time. In a way, Deke
invented the original intergroup net by trying to put together a database of the other groups
out there, using telephone and written correspondence - I was really impressed when I got
a letter from this kid Deke Sharon in Boston who had heard my work with the Mendicants
from all the way over in California" (personal communication, Feb. 14, 2007).
35. The BOCA albums are available for purchase online through A-Cappella.com:
http://www.a-cappella.com.
36. Julia Barnathan and Lianna Levine, Brandeis University Company B,, personal interview, Oct. 2, 2004 (hereafter Barnathan and Levine interview).
37. It is worth noting that, throughout my research, I never observed a cappella musicians discussing their music in terms of authenticity. However, the term's prevalence in the
scholarly literature on popular music testifies to its utility when examining the ideologies
behind musical practices. See, for example, Simon Frith, /y/The Magic That Can Set You
Free': The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community," Popular Music 1 (1981):
159-68; Steve Redhead and John Street, "Have I the Right?: Legitimacy, Authenticity and
Community in Folk's Politics," Popular Music 8, no. 2 (1989): 177-84; Motti Regev, "Israeli
Rock, or a Study in the Politics of 'Local Authenticity'," Popular Music 11, no. 1 (1992): 1-14;
Sara Cohen, "Identity, Place, and the 'Liverpool Sound,'" in Ethnicity, Identity, and Music:
The Musical Construction of Place, ed. Martin Stokes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),
117-34; David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 75-107; Allan F. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock, 2nd
ed. (Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2001); and Aaron Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in
Working Class Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
38. Anna Callahan, Anna's Amazing A Cappella Arranging Advice: The Collegiate A Cappella
Arranging Manual (Southwest Harbor, Maine: Contemporary A Cappella Publishing, 1995),
1, 20, 39. "Transanging" is Callahan's term; only once in my field work did an a cappella
participant use it.
39. James Harrington, posted in the discussion forum of the Recorded A Cappella Review
Board (RARB) (http://www.rarb.org) (topic: "a theory about imitative arrangements"),
Sept. 27, 2004.
40. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a standardized format in
which computers and other digital instruments can share musical information. MIDI files
contain instructions for computers to synthesize a song and can be imported into most
music notation software.
41. Drew Cohen, Brandeis University VoiceMale, personal interview, Oct. 5, 2004 (hereafter Cohen interview).
42. A "bell chord" is an arranging technique whereby four voices enter in succession to
create a chord, each voice ringing like a bell. Related terms include "cascade" (all voices
begin in unison and while the highest voice maintains its pitch, the others descend in
succession to their chord tones) and "pyramid" (a bell chord that builds from the lowest
voice/pitch). Definitions for many barbershop terms (such as "bell chord") can be found
in the glossary for Averill, Four Parts, No Waiting, 205-10.
43. A former VoiceMale member credits the group's uncommon and inventive syllables
to the ethnic and linguistic diversity of its arrangers: one was from Israel, while another
was from India. He offered the syllabic combination "kin-diddle-ray-doh, kin-doh-dohdiddle-rai" as an example. "Nobody thinks of that kind of stuff," he said, "if you're thinking in English." Such syllabic combinations are valuable and creative because they do not
directly mimic any particular instrument and because they are unfamiliar to listeners'
ears. Here, syllable choice is motivated by a desire to distinguish the group's sound from
that of other vocal and choral ensembles, including other campus groups. Eli Schneider,
504
Duchan
Brandeis University VoiceMale, personal interview, Sept. 28, 2004 (hereafter Schneider
interview).
44. John Potter, Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 169.
45. Averill, Four Parts, No Waiting, 165.
46. One instance when singers actively sought vibrato was when trying to effect a gospel
style. Moreover, soloists do not necessarily need to avoid vibrato when singing a song's
lead because it could function as a marker of emotional intensity.
47. Garnett, "Ethics and Aesthetics"; Goosman, "The Black Atlantic." The Lutheran Choir
of St. Olaf 's College, Northfield, Minn., was founded in 1907 by F. Melius Christiansen. It
was noted for its straight-tone singing, which, through its tours, inspired legions of high
school choir directors to adopt a similar practice of avoiding vibrato while also drawing
criticism (see Keene, A History of Music Education, 308-14).
48. Schneider interview.
49. Jon Weinstein, Brandeis University VoiceMale, personal interview, Sept. 23, 2004.
50. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1996), 191.
51. Jane Mclntosh credits the Tufts University Beelzebubs with bringing vocal percussion to collegiate a cappella on their 1991 album, Foster Street (Mclntosh, "In Harmony").
Although the Beelzebubs, led by Deke Sharon, were pioneers in collegiate a cappella in
the early 1990s, they were not alone in recording vocal percussion: the University of North
Carolina Clef Hangers' Safari (1992), for which some tracks were recorded in 1991, also
includes vocal percussion. Recording engineer Bill Hare also recalls the Stanford University
Mendicants recording vocal percussion around 1989 (personal communication). Most collegiate a cappella recordings are produced in limited quantities and not widely distributed,
so a comprehensive survey of recordings is difficult. Moreover, a group's recordings may
sound quite different from their live performances. Thus, we cannot assume that recorded
vocal percussion indicates its frequent use in live performance, although anecdotal evidence suggest that it was new to the University of Pennsylvania Counterparts when they
observed the Beelzebubs at a joint performance in Boston in 1991. Sangho Byun, personal
communication, Jan. 13, 2005.
52. Personal observation, vocal percussion workshop held at the Michigan A Cappella
Conference, Sept. 9, 2006. Wes Carroll was one of the founding members of Five O'Clock
Shadow and later joined the House Jacks. He has produced an instructional video that
some a cappella groups use: Mouthdrumming, vol. 1, Introduction to Vocal Percussion, video
cassette and DVD (Southwest Harbor, Maine: Mainely A Cappella, 1988).
53. Deborah Wong, Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music (New York: Routledge,
2004), 250. The definition of "cipher" is drawn from Wong's correspondence with Asian
American hip-hop artist Peril-L of the Mountain Brothers. Wong's analysis stresses the
role of technology in hip-hop compositional practice: "hip-hoppers refer constantly to
the technologies employed in their compositional process, e.g., beatboxes and mics, but
in this case 'beatbox' means rhyming out loud over a human beatbox, or mouth percussion accompaniment - a performative history that reabsorbs the acoustic percussion -
electronic beatbox process back into oral performance."
54. There is little scholarship on beatboxing; most discussions of rap emphasize creative
uses of technologies such as turntables, mixers, and samplers rather than percussive or
nonsensical sounds, e.g., Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). A notable exception is
David Toop, The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop (London: Pluto Press, 1984).
55. Michael Feldman, posted on the RARB forum (topic: "vocal percussion vs beatboxing"), May 30, 2005.

56. "LilVPboy," posted on the Contemporary A Cappella Society forum (http://www.
casa.org) (topic: "Vocal Percussion"-"Na'ive Question"), Sept. 26, 2005.
57. "eksingpuccusser," posted on the RARB forum (topic: "vocal percussion vs beatboxing"), June 10, 2005.
58. Personal observation at Bill Hare's studio (Bill Hare Productions), Aug. 10, 2005.
59. Goosman calls the practice of creating vocal accompaniments "basing," and observes
that singers in postwar black harmony groups called the practice "'backgrounding' a lead."
It was usually applied to songs in typical Tin Pan Alley, AABA form. The A sections would
be sung using call-and-response techniques, with a lead singer calling and the background
singers responding and supporting harmonically. In the B section, the texture would often
shift to "concerted harmony" (Goosman, "The Black Atlantic," 86).
60. There is a considerable musicological literature on musical quotation and borrowing,
too vast to be mentioned here, that ranges from medieval music to the present, including
art music and popular music. J. Peter Burkholder writes in his article on the subject in The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians: "Approaches to influence, borrowing, allusion
and intertextuality in the parallel fields of art history and literary criticism are bringing
fresh insights to the study of borrowing in music and to the relationships between the
arts. The expansion of research is making it possible for the first time to see all the uses of
existing music, from contrafactum, organum and cantus firmus to collage, jazz contrafacts
and digital sampling, as aspects of a single field that crosses historical periods and research
specializations" (s.v. "borrowing"). For an overview of borrowing from a perspective that
seeks to include all historical periods, genres, and styles, see J. Peter Burkholder, "The Uses
of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field," Notes 50, no. 3 (1994): 851-70.
61. A powerful example would be "Slumber," by Gabriel Mann, originally performed
by the Gabriel Mann Situation, arranged by Stacey Burcham for the co-ed USC SoCal
VoCals and recorded on The SoCal VoCals (2004) (also featured on the Best of College A Cappella 2004). At approximately 4:07 into the recording, the driving percussion stops (with a
dramatic reverse cymbal effect) just as all the voices join the soloist in singing the song's
refrain. This climactic moment, powerful because for the first and only time in the song all
voices sing the most important lyrics together, leads directly into the final chorus, during
which disparate motives from earlier in the song weave in and out of the texture while
the overall dynamic relaxes in the approach to the final chord.
62. Barnathan and Levine interview.
63. George Plasketes, "Re-flections on the Cover Age: A Collage of Continuous Coverage
in Popular Music/' Popular Music and Society 28, no. 2 (2005): 150.
64. Although most a cappella groups perform a repertory based on preexisting recordings, in recent years original compositions have become more common (e.g., the Stanford
University Fleet Street Singers' 2004 album, Fleet Street, which consists entirely of original
compositions).
65. Ariel Horn, University of Pennsylvania Counterparts, personal interview, April 19,
2001.
66. Cohen interview.
67. Stebbins, The Barbershop Singer, 62-72.
68. Simon Frith, "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music, in Music and Society: The
Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 140, 142; and R. J. Warren Zanes, "A Fan's
Notes: Identification, Desire, and the Haunted Sound Barrier," in Rock Over the Edge: Trans-
formations in Popular Music Culture, ed. Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook, and Ben Saunders
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 297. Zanes calls identification "grounded in
psychoanalytic thought, which, following Freud, involves a 'wanting to be/ an imitation
o/that with which one identifies."
69. Sara Samimi, Harvard University Fallen Angels, personal interview, Feb. 15, 2005.
506
Duchan
RECORDINGS CITED
Best of College A Cappella. Series of compact discs, annual. Varsity Vocals, 1995-.
Boston University Treblemakers. "Instant Pleasure." Author's field recordings,

2004-5. Originally by Seth Swirsky, recorded by Rufus Wainwright on the Big
Daddy film soundtrack (Sony 69946, 1999).
Levine and J. Valentine, recorded by Maroon 5 on Songs about Jane (Octone

50001, 2002).
Boyz II Men. "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday." From Cooleyhighharmony (Motown 6320, 1991).
Originally recorded by Michael Jackson.
Brandeis University VoiceMale. "Human Nature." Author's field recordings,
2004-5. Originally recorded by Michael Jackson.
A Cappella 2004. Originally by Guy Chambers and Robbie Williams, recorded
by Robbie Williams on Life Thru a Lens (Chrysalis 6127, 1997).
Cornell University Hangovers. "Human Nature." From Blackout. 2005. Originally
recorded by Michael Jackson.
Jackson, Michael. "Human Nature." By Steven Porcaro and John Bettis. From
Thriller (Epic QE-38112, 1982).
Joel, Billy. "The Longest Time." From An Innocent Man (Columbia CK 38837,
1983).
McFerrin, Bobby. "Don't Worry, Be Happy." From Simple Pleasures (EMI E2-48059,
1988).
Rundgren, Todd. A Capella (Warner Bros. 9251281, 1985).
Stanford University Fleet Street Singers. Fleet Street. 2004.
Steppenwolf. "Magic Carpet Ride." By John Kay and Rush ton Moreve. From
Steppenwolfthe Second (Dunhill DS-50037, 1968).
University of Michigan Amazin' Blue. "Kyrie." From A Little Crazy. 1994. Also
featured on the Best of College A Cappella 1996. Originally by Steve George,
John Lang, and Martin Paige, recorded by Mr. Mister on Welcome to the Real
World (RCA 89647, 1985).
corded by Sting on Ten Summoner's Tales (A&M 89567, 1993).
University of North Carolina Clef Hangers. Safari. 1992.
University of Southern California SoCal VoCals. "Slumber." From The SoCal
VoCals. 2004. Also featured on the Best of College A Cappella 2004. Originally
by Gabriel Mann, recorded by the Gabriel Mann Situation (not commercially
released).
University of Virginia Gentlemen. "Insomniac." From Seven and Seven. 1995. Also
featured on the Best of College A Cappella 1996. Originally by Kristian Bush,
recorded by Billy Pilgrim on Billy Pilgrim (Atlantic 82515-2, 1994).
Yale University Whiffenpoofs. The Whiffenpoofs of 1958 (privately pressed,
1958).

Collegiate A Cappella: Emulation and Originality

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Collegiate A Cappella: Emulation and Originality

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Collegiate a Cappella: Emulation and Originality

Author(s): Joshua S. Duchan

A cappella groups thrive on college and university campuses throughout

Collegiate a cappella balances emulation - a desire to sound like its

2008 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Certain musical characteristics distinguish collegiate a cappella from

tieth centuries and features primarily equal-voice settings.3 Second,

On the other hand, Serge Lacasse associates "the idea of interpretation

I take Weinstein's definitions as a point of departure because they offer

tertextual practices. Despite the theoretical distinctions in the discourse

Collegiate A Cappella 479

pella groups. They are based primarily on ethnographic research with a

at Harvard whose meetings also included singing.14 The Yale Musical

to start with the Whiffenpoofs, a seven-man group that emerged from

including the Glee Club.19

(Columbia University, 1949), the Friars (University of Michigan, 1955),

Collegiate A Cappella 481

Figure 1. Growth of Collegiate A Cappella, 1909-2005.

posium of 1967, the Music Educators National Conference endorsed

were founded at single-sex schools. Although some schools with strong

ing collegiate scene. A popular PBS television documentary directed by

rec.music.a-cappella. In 1994 the Recorded A Cappella Review Board

Collegiate A Cappella 483

and melodic aspects of a song's commercial recording. An audience's

ing, and it needs to be reproduced accurately to satisfy audiences.37

exactly what you hear.

restructuring, simplification, range adjustments, syllable assigning,

Callahan's terminology suggests that emulation alone fails to produce

arrangers using commercially published piano and vocal arrangements

ten closely and repeatedly to a song's original recording and determine

Collegiate A Cappella 485

tal riffs from the commercial recording. In VoiceMale's arrangement of

sings the muted guitar's melodic interjections ("Muted Gtr").

-'"I^^GG^vGvUj ^GG^uiftfd} ^GtS^GGG^O iH GG^GG^jUj '

2.:. , pj~'J~r ' i'r 7^ linj'ZJ* y so " '

^ . .... . ^ .. .., ., , .h.

^,J>^. jfc-H* |J^~; J/v- i u -p4^>

^J: & i. \l 1 si. * P ' '

Example 1. Michael Jackson's "Human Nature," verse. Arranged by Drew Cohen

arrangements that include a soloist. At times when soloists do stand out

using syllables with a j sound, such as "jun," "jin," "sjun," in order to

ginia Gentlemen's recording of Billy Pilgrim's "Insomniac"). VoiceMale's

When syllables are used to map an instrument's acoustical attack,

Collegiate A Cappella 487

a "straight tone" (sometimes called a "flat tone") while on background

shoppers, the singers I consulted avoid vibrato because it inhibits a

One VoiceMale member explained the group's stylistic preference: "As

Collegiate A Cappella 489

ingly imitate those of actual drums, professional vocal percussionist Wes

"Vocal percussion" (sometimes abbreviated as "VP"), "beatboxing,"

improvising rhymes while accompanied by beatboxing or a prerecorded

source sound), and beatboxing "darker" because practitioners hold a

Figure 2. Vocal percussion gestures (L).

Figure 3. Miming guitars, SUNY-Binghamton Crosbys performing at Yale

Collegiate A Cappella 491

When a cappella arrangers adapt a pop record in an arrangement, they

much of their time singing (often repetitive) background parts.

a cappella song beyond just "equal" to the commercial recording and

other three can be used in the pursuit of a cappella's overall emulative

different musical source, with arrangement and source having only a

The prevalence of musical allusions in collegiate a cappella suggests

Collegiate A Cappella 493

Finally, the personal prerogative of the soloist offers a prime vehicle