A Cappella: The Voice as Musical Instrument
Since we can speak, we have been singing. The human voice is truly a magnificent instrument (if properly trained) when combined with other instruments, but on its own it can also work wonders. When one uses only the human voice to produce music, this is known as a cappella. ‘Cappella’ is the Italian word for ‘church’, so it should be no surprise that early a cappella music was often sacred.
One of the many late medieval composers who used nothing but a choir as their musical instrument of choice, was Johannes Ockeghem. Other notable artists are Palestrina and Josquin des Prez. They used polyphony to great effect, and you can listen to some beautiful examples below.
But let’s make a huge leap through time now. Another great example of a cappella music might be more of an open book to you: barbershop music. Barbershop music derives its name from, unsurprisingly, the barbershops where this music was made. In early 20th century America, being a barber was something for lower class citizens, which African Americans were at the time.
They recreated and harmonized traditional songs, and a new style of music was born. White Americans soon began to take over, using barbershop music in their blackface shows, which stereotyped African Americans and their culture. And so it was that barbershop music came to be associated with white singers, but it is most definitely an African American tradition.
For more on the history of barbershop music, you may want to read these two articles: The historical roots of barbershop harmony by Jim Henry, and An Historical View of Barbershop Music and the Sight-Reading Methodology and Learning Practices of Early Championship Barbershop Quartet Singers, 1939-1963 by Benjamin C. Ayling.
By the 1930s, barbershop music had all but disappeared. The advent of the radio offered people the opportunity to listen to music at home at their leisure, so they didn’t have to visit vaudeville or minstrel shows anymore, where barbershop music was often performed.
Fortunately, the tradition is still being upheld, and some of the modern-day barbershop singers use modern techniques to sing in a quartet… but not really. To understand what I mean, you’ll have to watch the video below.
Amazing, isn’t it? A single guy performing a piece for a barbershop quartet. If you look on YouTube, you can find a lot more examples of these so-called multi-track recordings. But enough talking about it, let’s hear how it works, straight from the horse’s mouth. I’ve asked Julien Neel, the YouTube user who created the above video, some questions:
How did your interest in barbershop music develop?
I played Harold Hill in the famous musical “The Music Man” by Meredith Wilson, back in college and discovered the well-known “Lida Rose” and “Sincere” melodies sung by the Buffalo Bills. I quickly became fond of the tight, precise harmonies of this style of music. I also appreciated the underlying math behind barbershop, in terms of frequency ratios between the different voices that produces the so-called overtone effect which makes barbershop ring so much. I then discovered the Suntones, Gas House Gang and Bluegrass Student Union, and others. All were artistically inspiring and technically amazing. Anyhow, I’m just an amateur Frenchman singer with a taste for barbershop, this is just a hobby. Barbershop isn’t very popular in France, so my knowledge of the subject is limited to what I find on my own.
Where do you get your music from?
I either buy it online or get it off the web or from friends. There are plenty of sites to choose from, for instance a-cappella.com or merphant.net/barbershop.
How do you arrange or adapt music?
I don’t arrange (yet!) my music and saying I “adapt” would be a bit pompous. I really work directly from sheet music. I unfortunately cannot play the piano nor can I sight read, so I have to convert every score into a MIDI file in order to hear what it sounds like, though I do have an idea beforehand. Most of the songs I did, I had heard before, either live or as recordings.
Can you shed some light on the process of recording a multi-track video?
It doesn’t require a big financial investment to begin with: a simple webcam will do. In terms of software, I used Audacity and Movie Maker, which are both free programs. The process of making the video is pretty straightforward. I first learn the score to the best of my abilities, meaning I memorize all 4 voices. I think this first step is crucial if you want to tell a story and sing it well. I annotate the score where there are important passages or difficult transitions, and work on these till I get them down. I then make a few takes of the lead or the bass, whichever voice can well serve as a template track for the rhythm, then I listen to this recording as I sing the other voices along to it. There’s usually a trade-off between precision in timing and in pitch: if I listen to several voices at once, the chord is easy to make out but the timing is less precise, and vice versa. Needless to say I redo each voice several times until I’m satisfied with the result. I also use a few “tricks”, like drinking a lot of beer to get my voice low enough to sing bass comfortably, given that I’m more of a baritone/tenor… During the recording, I make discrete gestures to give cues for the other voices or sometimes even add vocal cues that I listen to in the headphones you can see in my videos. I also spend a little time doing post-processing on the recordings, like balancing the voices and boosting certain frequencies in the voices that are too weak. The whole process, from start to finish takes me between 10 and 20 hours, depending on how hard the song is.
Who are your idols? What’s your favourite song?
I enjoy many styles of music, but if I had to choose say four, my favorite singers would be the amazing lyrical tenor Caruso (1900s), the Mills Brothers (1930s and 40s), the King Singers (70s) and the Comedian Harmonists (early 1930s). I am more into vintage music and don’t really enjoy our modern pitch-perfect auto-tuned vocals. A lot of the good, warm story-telling with strong vocal technique has been replaced by poor singers with a lot of sound engineering, it’s too bad. Take their microphone and their sound engineers away from them and see how they sound… One of my favorite “songs” (more a romanza from an opera) is “Una Furtiva Lagrima” sung in 1904 by Caruso.
What are your plans for future multi-track videos?
I’d like to sing something in French, probably “La Mer” by Charles Trenet (also known as “Under the Sea”). I’m French but have mostly sung in English and German so far. There are many other barbershop classics I’d like to do, like the classics “Coney Island Baby” and “Sweet Adeline”.
So as you can see, a cappella music is far from dead, thanks to people like Julien. But it’s not just barbershop music that is sung a cappella these days. Modern a cappella ranges from beatboxing to extremes like hero metal a cappella. So next time you hear music without instruments, give it a chance, because the voice is an instrument too.
I can’t believe you didn’t talk about crimping! Look it up!
All right, you can write an article about that then.
I will! After my interview with Jared