Powerful Voices: The Musical and Social World of Collegiate A Cappella

by Joshua S Duchan

Overview

Collegiate a cappella, part of a long tradition of unaccompanied singing, is known to date back on American college campuses to at least the colonial era. Considered in the context of college glee clubs, barbershop quartets, early-twentieth-century vocal pop groups, doo-wop groups, and contemporary a cappella manifestations in pop music, collegiate a cappella is an extension of a very old tradition of close harmony singing—-one that includes but also goes beyond the founding of the Yale Whiffenpoofs. Yet despite this important history, collegiate a cappella has until now never been the subject of scholarly examination.

In Powerful Voices: The Musical and Social World of Collegiate A Cappella, Joshua S. Duchan offers the first thorough accounting of the music's history and  reveals how the critical issues of sociability, gender, performance, and technology affect its music and experience. Just as importantly, Duchan provides a vital contribution to music scholarship more broadly, in several important ways: by expanding the small body of literature on choruses and amateur music; by addressing musical and social processes in a field where the vast majority of scholarship focuses on individuals and their products; and by highlighting a musical context long neglected by musicologists—-the college campus. Ultimately, Powerful Voices is a window on a world of amateur music that has begun to expand its reach internationally, carrying this uniquely American musical form to new global audiences, while playing an important role in the social, cultural, and musical education of countless singers over the last century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472118250
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	04/04/2012
Series:	Tracking Pop
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Joshua S. Duchan is Assistant Professor of Music at Wayne State University.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part I Collegiate a Cappella's Predecessors, Inception, and Historical Moment

1 From Nineteenth-Century Glee Clubs to Barbershop Harmony 11

2 The Whiffenpoofs: The "First" A Cappella Group 23

3 Doo-Wop and Late-Twentieth-Century Vocal Pop 36

4 The A Cappelia Explosion 45

Part II Contemporary Collegiate a Cappella: Performance, Technology, and Community

5 Musical Components and Their Social Motivations 67

6 In Rehearsal: A Cappelia's Social Performance 87

7 In Performance: Gender, Humor, Gesture, and Politics 105

8 Technology in Collegiate A Cappella Performance and Recording 133

9 Listening to Recordings: BOCA and Discourse 157

Conclusion 179

Notes 185

Bibliography 223

Index 251