A Capella at Its Most ahh… Compelling
I stumble into a crowded music rehearsal room on a Saturday morning at 10 am, seven hours after getting to Amherst College. Around me are a few dozen others, ranging in age from early 20’s to mid-80’s. Next to me is a guy I’ve never met before, just-arrived after a 32-hour trip from Angola. Across the room is someone in from New Zealand. Another guy from Japan; one from Portugal; a fellow in his late 70’s from Austria. East Coasters. West Coasters. For the next two hours we painstakingly rehearse two songs we’ve sung a couple of hundred times in our lives, trying to get them just right.
Why rehearse songs you’ve sung hundreds of times? Because it matters — to us.
It's the 75th anniversary of an a capella group we were all in during our time at the college, the Zumbyes.
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There are few people indifferent about a capella music. There are fanatics and haters, quiet and vocal. Some people listen and hear lame four-part karaoke, performed by self-absorbed dweebs; others hear beauty and see stars. To the extent the genre appears at all on mainstream TV or film, it is most often used as a plot device to suggest smugness and privilege, (take, most recently, a subplot in Episode 6 of “Your Friends & Neighbors”). And to some it will sound, in the words of the a capella commentator (played by former Zumbye Michael Higgins) in Pitch Perfect, “like an elephant dart to the public’s eye.”
I get that. Yes, a capella can be awful. And… it can also be sublime, a thing of beauty for those performing and those performed upon.
We’d come back on this Saturday morning because of a collective nagging memory that this thing we had done for a while, together, during our respective times at the school (imagine Kool and the Gang with a different Kool and new gang members every couple of years), was something special, worth remembering and recapturing and celebrating.
Like a lot of groups with a history, the Zumbyes have traditions: there’s a hyper-competitive and mysterious audition process. Once you’re in, you’re introduced to a strange group handshake, to be performed while reciting an even stranger group motto. There’s an odd fruit costume bestowed upon one member each year. Getting in to the group launches you in to a schedule of ten hours a week of rehearsals, old members teaching parts to newbies. There’s choreography to learn and comedy sketches to write and hone — all to get ready for a series of minimally-compensated performances on campus and off. Every couple of years the group saves up enough to record a new album (31 so far). Each year there is a winter or spring tour and competitions (the International Championship of Collegiate A Capella, or ICCA, highlighted in Pitch Perfect, is one grail, the PBS competition “Sing That Thing” is another). The year ends with a blowout two-hour final concert on campus. Graduating Zumbyes are sung over the hill; new ones introduced. Rinse. Repeat.
It's easy to see how all that could blend into the haze over time. This weekend was proof that it hasn’t.
There was something real and abiding and meaningful that happened during our time as Zumbyes, then again when we reuned. It’s the kind of thing that more of us need more of in our lives.
We all need to find pockets of joy. When I leave this world, there will be a few things that I remember on my way out. One of them will be the feeling that comes when musical notes, sung just the right way, dance with each other. It happened for me for the first time standing next to one of my fellow Zumbyes in a rehearsal room in September of 1979. In the middle of a song called “Here Without You,” we sang two notes into each other’s face. Then the notes collided and created an entirely different note above them that neither of us was singing. I felt my entire body shake; a gobsmack moment. I chased that high for the rest of my time in the group. Jerry Clark (’52), one of the group’s founding members, tried to get at the feeling when he said,
“Singing with the Zumbyes was the closest thing to sex that I can imagine.” He was wrong. Those magical musical moments were better.
Each of us finds those pinnacle moments of joy in different places: once in a while in the perfect flow in an athletic performance; sometimes in the sync of making scenes or sentences or products with a creative or work partner; maybe in the fire of a peak religious experience. I’d add to those the moment I watched my bride walk down the aisle toward me and saw a child launch on that first solo bike flight. You can’t manufacture joy, but when it comes you have to accept it. The Zumbyes brought me joy.
We all need to do a few things well. The first couple of years of college were deeply humbling to me. I ran into calculus I just couldn’t do – the math major was out. I had defined myself in high school by how “smart” I thought I was; somehow or another almost everyone in college turned out to be smarter. I was holding on to a spot on the tennis team by a hangnail. Then I got in to this singing group. I found I was good at it. And with the other people in the group I realized we were collectively good. That became a touchstone for me – when those other things I had used to define myseif went away, I knew I was good at this one thing.
I got to sing with most of these guys in college — Zumbyes reuners from the classes of ‘74-’86. The rest I wished I could have (Photo Andrew Sloat).
On some level it doesn’t matter what the things we do well are – we just need to believe they matter. Early in my work career when I got insecure I would tell myself that, even if I wasn’t great at what I was doing, I at least worked harder than anyone else. Later, it felt reassuring to know that I was damned good at summarizing meetings and assigning followups (don’t judge me) or organizing and executing complicated projects. The attainment of excellence doesn’t have to be work-related or even significant: for me it matters to know that I am exceptional at grilling salmon, hitting drop shots, negotiating on car prices and dividing three digit numbers by seven. It also matters that, when I needed to be good at something, it turns out I was good at singing the low splits of Zumbyes second tenor parts.
We all need to belong to something larger. When I first heard about the group I was aware that it had been around for a while – one of my roommates was the son of the founder. There were a dozen old albums on the books, legends of Zumbyes who’d gone on to win Tony’s and Emmy’s for their music or acting. The group performed at big games (the NBA Warriors are 0-5 when the Zumbyes sing the national anthem), on big stages (Carnegie Hall is big, right?) in exotic countries (well, occasionally. Is Disney Japan exotic or just Disney?). The people in the group seemed to find the right balance of funny, earnest, self-deprecating and (as much as any a capella group can be) cool.
When I got in, I felt pride by association — and a responsibility to step up.
Traditions are under fire these days. A lot of Americans seem frustrated enough with the direction of the country that we’re cheering on the nuking of norms and incineration of institutions by others. But our society can’t survive with 350 million independent actors: we still need faith communities, civic associations, government agencies, neighborhood groups and, yes, even music groups. Those organizations and their traditions and norms teach us how to live with each other; how to temporarily sublimate our id to the pursuit of bigger goals.
When I taught English early in my career, students would always complain about having to learn grammar. My argument was that most of the rules are there for a reason, and you have to understand the conventions before you decide which ones to break. Over 75 years, the Zumbyes have slowly evolved, from barbershop music to jazz and pop and percussion; from standstill formality to humor and choreography; from all-male to co-ed. But there is a throughline: beautiful, entertaining a capella music.
The latest Zumbye group looks little like the original group. But they share something important.
We need to be recognized for doing things well. The Zumbyes group I was in during college made some amazing music in the rehearsal room. And it was cool to spend that much time with a small group of people. But as fun as it is to make music with each other, it feels better singing in front of an audience.
A music performance is never a monologue: you call out with your song and someone responds.
You adjust by backing off or amping up; they respond again. And when it is working, you dance together.
If I were more fully self-actualized, I would say here that I don’t need external validation to know my worth. But it feels so good to be told or shown that something you’ve worked hard at – a speech, a memo, a service, a product, a sympathy note, a song -- means something to somebody else.
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The Saturday evening concert was a trip through Zum time.
On Saturday evening, seven different age-bound groups of Zums, ranging from the class of 1962 through the class of 2028, stood up in front of a packed house to sing a couple of songs from each of our “eras.” Audience members nodded along to the songs they remembered, laughed at our jokes, seemed impressed by our choreography. There were a bunch of standing ovations – from one group to another and from the audience to all of us. And then 100 Zumbyes stood together for those two songs we’d practiced that morning. One of them was called “Everytime We Say Goodbye.”
“When you’re near, there’s such an air of spring about it
I can hear a lark somewhere begin to sing about it
There’s no love song finer
But how strange the change from major to minor
Everytime we say goodbye.”
The jam session that followed the concert went on till 5 am, with a 60 year spread of people singing and teaching each other their favorite new and old songs – one person compared it to “playing pickup basketball with All-Stars.”
There were a lot of tears, I think because we…
…remembered what we used to have together
…and what we no longer had together
…and what we’d just gotten one more glimpse of
…and what we were going to say goodbye to soon.
But we were also there, together, right then. And we were good. Damned good. Again.
-Leslie
Notes:
Zumbyes home page: http://www.thezumbyes.com
An excerpt from Pitch Perfect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrnHfohUVrA
How overtones work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone
The first Zumbyes song recorded, from 1952: https://youtu.be/5meEvOf55So
An audio recording of “Here Without You”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvE4HiQ8g4Y
Excerpt from Zumbyes on “Sing That Thing”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeAZI0_kXSQ
Zumbyes 75th anniversary concert: https://youtu.be/4eRPyTyKZow