Inside the World of A Cappella

It could be any of them. They slip into your Core classes and scamper right up to the front of the room. As if impelled by something deep inside, they belt out the first few bars of some vaguely familiar song. Then one of them steps out from the group to identify the ensemble and invite you to its "jam." Finally, they rattle off a few more notes and disappear as quickly as they arrived.

I have been trying to crack the a cappella riddle for several months now. Why do all the groups have such snappy, clever names? Why do they all use that same human horseshoe configuration? Why must the singers constantly trade places between songs? And what do these people have against instruments?

My personal feelings about a cappella music are difficult to put into words. For some reason, I can't help comparing it to the time two years ago I went to a Celtics-Magic playoff game. Trailing for nearly the entire game, the Celtics cut the Orlando lead to one with a couple minutes left in the fourth quarter, and the crowd went into the most boisterous display of cheering and stomping I had ever seen. There was this undescribable and irrepressible sense of excitement wafting through the building. I couldn't help myself from becoming caught up in the experience. And then, just when I thought it couldn't possibly get any louder, something extraordinary happened: an image of Larry Bird (Larry Bird!), cheering from his court side seat, flashed onto the monitors scattered around the Garden. When the fans saw the basketball legend, they reacted as if God himself had sided with the Celtics; the already overpowering level of electricity in the Boston Garden doubled! The crowd was gloriously bound together in a moment of fanatic lunacy!

Let's put it this way: I've never felt anything like that at an a cappella concert.

Still, the pervasiveness of a cappella at Harvard, the existence of a veritable a cappella culture, has fascinated me since I got here. So I started to dig. I scourged the depths of the a cappella world in search of some explanation to the peculiar phenomenon, some understanding of what makes a cappella tick. Eventually I found out about the complexity of scripting an a cappella performance, the countless hours spent on things like choreography and "patter." I found out about the dual role of the annual Freshman Jam as both an initiation of a new audience and a way for all the groups to advertise themselves in front of prospective singers. But these things didn't interest me nearly as much as something no one was particularly interested in talking about: The A Cappella Council.

The mere idea of it fascinated me: Is it a cappella's answer to the League of Justice on the old superhero cartoon "Superfriends"? Is it so exclusive that I'd never even heard of it? Right away, members of the a cappella community made it difficult for me to discern whether I had stumbled upon a typical administrative body or I had sniffed out a cappella's deepest, darkest secret. Crooners refused to comment on it. They denied its existence. They told me it was really no big deal.

Despite the shroud of secrecy surrounding the council, when I learned about a meeting that was going to be held well after midnight at the Hasty Pudding Club, I knew I had to be there. Smelling my Pulitzer Prize in the balance, I begged anyone who would listen to let me sit in. I was promptly refused--absolutely no journalists allowed. I wasn't going to take no for an answer, however, and I resolved to stakeout the Pudding, to cover the meeting surreptitiously. But then I decided to write some e-mail and go to sleep.

The next day I swang by Newbury ("Shop here, die happy") Comics on my way home from class. I circled the store twice, browsing the trendy t-shirts, the beatnik literature, the Pulp Fiction posters and, of course, the tons and tons of CDs. Rock, reggae, rap, folk, country, jazz, blues, classical, comedy, spoken word, soundtracks, compilations--yet amazingly, I couldn't find what I was looking for.

I guess the world isn't ready for a cappella. But when the revolution comes, Harvard will be prepared. All too prepared.

Dan S. Aibel's column appears on alternate Wednesdays.