I dearly loved my time with the Sirens of Gotham as both a singer and director. The chorus is made up of some of the hardest-working, passionate, and down-to-earth singers I have met, and they continue to make fantastic choral music—barbershop and otherwise—in New York City. The future of barbershop is in great hands!
Everyone in harmony.
The road to qualifying for any international barbershop event (be it BHS, SAI, or HI) is long — [a year out]
By the time I joined the chorus in ? , they had already competed in the qualifying rounds of the regional chorus contest held in Albany, NY.
Sweet Adelines International (Greater NY/NJ Region 15)
Sweet Adelines offers some flexibility in the (infamously rigid!) arranging guidelines for the contest set, allowing a mix of both ‘traditional’ barbershop harmony as well as multi-part vocal music (such as, in this case, contemporary a cappella). In arranging our final song to close out our contest set, I knew we would be walking the stylistic tightrope of singing a popular song (“This Is Me,” chosen by the chorus and an apt thematic tie-in to our other contest songs), arranged more like a pop a cappella group, and therefore tried to balance this with “choral” moments, simple vocal percussion, and nods to the barbershop sound / performance tropes when possible.
I knew I wanted to recall the main themes of our previous three songs, which happens with the quartet at 1:54; this cooling off and down-sizing of the texture sets the stage (ha!) for the final push to the finish when the rest of the chorus re-enters, still echoing those themes as “This Is Me” returns to the forefront.
I also arranged some simple, aleatoric transitions to bridge the gaps between songs, set up new key areas, and reiterate messages relating to our repertoire.