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November 2008 InCider Press Page 3 |
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I was born and raised in a small farm town in central Michigan, just down the road from Michigan State University, where I got my BA in English and (eventually) my MA in Linguistics. Jean, my wife of 44 years now, married me between undergrad and grad school and has helped support me ever since. My career as a teacher of English as a second language (ESL) led us to live in a lot of interesting places. We spent a lot of years as expats, living first in Taiwan for a year and a half, then in American Samoa for three and a half years before more or less settling down at the University of Toronto for seven years or so. Our first son was born in Samoa, and our second was born in Canada. After Toronto, we went to Beijing, China for a year and then came back to settle in central Utah for the next 25 years, with a one-year sabbatical in Japan at about the half-way point. In most of those places, Jean practiced her profession as an elementary/special ed teacher in international schools. I’ve also done some short-term solo volunteer ESL gigs on the Thai-Burma border, in India, and in Hungary. As you might guess, both Jean and I love travel. My first experience of barbershop was via the Buffalo Bills in Music Man. (I just realized how long ago that was!) I didn’t know any barbershoppers and had no formal knowledge of music, though I loved to sing, and never got a chance to sing with other barbershoppers until late in our Canadian sojourn, when I was invited to sing with the Dukes of Harmony. Unfortunately, I was only with them a few months before we went to live in China. So, bottom line, this is my first experience with organized barbershop singing. Jean and I moved to Manhattan in December of last year because we wanted to be closer to our son, a career soldier at Ft. Riley and a permanent resident at Milford, and because we wanted to move to a larger town than the village we lived in in Utah. The move was a great one on both counts. We get to see our three grandkids a lot more frequently than we ever did before, and Manhattan has almost everything we were looking for in a place to retire. One of the first things I did after we got settled at Meadowlark Hills was look into barbershopping opportunities in the Little Apple. We went to the spring show and I signed up with the chorus immediately afterwards. Haven’t been sorry. The music is as great as I remember it being, and the friendship and fellowship have been beyond my expectations. I’m having a wonderful time with the chorus, and I’ll be here for as long as my voice holds out. Who knows – maybe I’ll even finally learn how to read music! ♪ |
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Meet Member Cam Beatty |
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In Barbershop Harmony 101 on November 20, from 7:00 p.m. – 7:25, prior to our Thursday rehearsal, we will discuss the relationships between parts with respect to volume of loudness. John Trail brought this up during a quartet rehearsal session, explaining how one part should have louder/softer volume (loudness) in relation to another part. I recall this discussion in presentations at Harmony University a couple years ago, and have never followed up on it in order to understand it better and have it become a part of my singing. Ken Lang explains volume relationship when we baritones should sing louder or softer in relation to the other parts, most often in relation to bass and lead singers. It made sense at the moment, but I find myself too concerned, usually, with learning words and notes to deal with volume in part relationships as a general skill. With John’s help during that quartet session, it becomes something of prime importance for me. Four of us may generate a Valentine’s Day quartet; the motivation to get my act together increases dramatically. Here you have some possible questions for the BH101 group (anyone who shows up) to discuss: 1. When does good harmony require that any one part 2. When should any one part sing softer than which 3. How much louder or softer (increased or decreased 4. Why do these situations need the changes of vol- ume? 5. What happens when we have a chorus with more or fewer guys on a part? 6. How much do changes in throat, tongue, lips, head, 7. Etc. (Any one of these items could occupy us for |
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Barbershop 101 Volume and parts By Loren Alexander Bari |
