Barbershop Singing In America

Everybody sings. Singing in the shower, singing while doing chores, singing while listening to music. It is an unmistakable part of human culture, and it has been for an incredibly long time. So long in fact, that voice is most likely man’s first instrument (Koopman). Thus, the very first form of music was a cappella. A cappella music is simply defined as music without instrumental accompaniment (Eichenwald). However, this includes a wide variety of music forms. The most significant of these are gregorian chants, barbershop quartets, doo-wop groups, and modern pop a cappella. I was introduced to a cappella music through YouTube, watching a modern group known as Pentatonix perform an a cappella rendition of the Evolution of Music. I immediately
Kerr discusses a small group of people who were lovers of barbershop and could not stand the idea of losing this long loved art form, so they formed the Society for The Preservation Of Encouragement of Barbershop Singing in America (SPEBSQSA). This was also known as The Barbershop Harmony society. The SPEBSQSA raised awareness for the potential fall of barbershop music and drastically increased its popularity, and still spreads the magic of barbershop to this day. Their goal is to prevent barbershop style music from ever dying off, and they so far are incredibly successful (Kerr). There are currently over 80,000 people worldwide who participate with the SPEBSQSA, and that number is constantly
Doo wop groups generally included three to six men, ideally with a bass, baritone, lead, tenor 2, and tenor 1 (Koopman). The main difference between barbershop and doo wop is that doo wop music utilizes several different nonsensical sounds and noises to create rhythm and harmonies, while barbershop quartets would almost always sing words, echoing the lead or harmonizing in time with him. For instance, doo wop bass singers would sing a “doomph doomph” sound to imitate an upright bass, or s tenor would sing “shang-a-lang” to emulate a guitar (Koopman). While doo wop groups were very popular for about a ten year period, they were did not sing very complex music. They rarely utilized the potential of minor chords, which could have added an incredible amount of musical variety, let alone rhythmic variety, lyrical changes, or even vocal parts, all according to John Koopman. Doo wop music was almost never performed by female singers, which seriously limited the the amount of potential variety for the style