Participants are warming up for a weekend of vocal creativity at the East Coast A Cappella Summit in March 23-25, Washington DC. The annual summit features concerts, masterclasses and the world´s best a cappella singing across an immense range of music genres including pop, soul, hard rock, comedy, world music, punk and almost any other style.
Italian for "like in the chapel (music)", a cappella or unaccompanied singing, reaches a much broader audience today than church-goers and has grown enormously over the past two decades. "Once upon a time, church music, doo-wop, and barbershop were the images that first leapt to mind, but things have changed," says Jonathan Minkoff, President of the Contemporary A Cappella Society (CASA) who host the East Coast Summit.
"There are thousands of professional and collegiate groups and very few of them have stayed with these traditional forms of a cappella. They sing the songs that they grew up with, the songs they love. That's almost always pop, rock, jazz and R&B," he says.
In a cappella singing, the performers produce music with nothing but the human voice; singing not only words but also using vocal chord techniques to emulate sounds of instruments. So what can't be sung a cappella? According to Mr Minkoff, "A cappella is limitless...contemporary a cappella has everything that makes popular music compelling, and beyond that we have a 'Wow! How did they do that?' factor."
And out of hundreds of recorded a cappella albums released each year who may be hopeful of being recognised at the Contemporary A cappella Recording Awards (CARAs), the "Grammys" of a cappella, there certainly is a lot of "wow factor".
Nominated as Best Pop/Rock Album in the 2006 CARAs, "Dark Side of the Moon A Cappella" is a prime example of the extensive possibilities of the human voice. Originally arranged for live performance, the album features eight singers and one vocal percussionist who recreate the entire 1973 original work by Pink Floyd without any instruments. All drum sounds and special effects including heartbeats and clock ticks are created vocally – it is something you have to hear to believe.
"At the root of 'Dark Side of the Moon A Cappella' is the use of a cappella as a means of taking the music to a different, more personal, level. The distillation of the forty-five minutes of instrumental and vocal music into nine voices is intended to at once highlight the power of the human voice and reveal new depths of the original material," states the musical arranger for the album, Jon Krivitzky, in a statement from the album's website.
"Singers are constantly inventing techniques that were previously unthinkable in order to sing in genres that people once thought impossible for a cappella," says CASA President Jonathan Minkoff. And once the awe of "Are they really doing that without instruments?!" wears off, contemporary a cappella reveals a rich exploration of our evolving musical language, emotions and communicative abilities across all musical styles.
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