chuckro | The Big Apple Chorus

I attended an open rehearsal of the Big Apple Chorus last night, and it was a lot of fun. They're a barbershop chorus, moderately professional but with an open admissions policy. The general atmosphere reminded me a lot of the St. Killian Players. Well, SKP with some Boy Scout troop thrown in, as it included some of the horsing around you get when too many y-chromosomes are in one place. I think this is around the level of seriousness I'm looking for, since I'm doing this for fun. If I wanted to work, well, I have both work and a self-study postgraduate program.

I was the youngest person there, except one '04 college grad. Ages range from twenty-somethings to guys who must be in their sixties, about 40 people all told. The chorus also includes two other Princeton-connected people: One member of the class of '68 who actually remembered my failed attempt at starting the Prince-Tones freshman year, and the guy whose company makes all the Reunions gear. Wacky, hunh?

The music isn't terribly hard, and sightreading came back to me to some degree. And my range is still perfectly intact. My breath support, however, is totally gone. I need to work on getting that back, especially if I'm going to be singing Tenor. (Barbershop tenor, for those of you who don't know, is "tenor 1" in choral terms and generally hovers around an alto range.)

I suspect I'll go back in two weeks, get a learning CD and some music, and see if I'm actually interested in joining full-time. Three hours on Mondays and the occasional concert is not a huge time commitment, and I have wanted to get back into a singing group for a while. We'll see.