It used to be that a 92.3% score was knocking at the door of a gold medal. In this year’s record-setting contest, that was good enough for 4th place for Sound of the Rockies, who presented an amazing military set. Director Darin Drown didn’t get the color of medal he wanted from his troops, but the bari of Storm Front still went home happy with quartet gold.

Beat that caption, PLEASE! The best one gets published in The Harmonizer!

To read the rules, click here to go to the initial post.

Have at it!

While their set was good enough for eighth place, we have to say that Midwest Vocal Express delivered the finest musical presentation of Olympic male synchronized swimming that the city of Philadelphia has ever seen performed in the barbershop style. At minimum, it was the best in recent memory. Above is the star of the winning nation’s team.

Beat that caption, PLEASE! The best one gets published in The Harmonizer!

To read the rules, click here to go to the initial post.

Have at it!

By now, you may have 2-year proposal in the 2-year proposal in the July-Aug 2010 issue of The Harmonizer, concerning the proposal to change the International Chorus Contest to a two-year rotation. If you haven’t read up on the plan, everything is at www.barbershop.org/2year. Perhaps you’ve even taken the poll, where you had a chance to leave anonymous comments.

Here’s the place to make your comments in public. What are your thoughts on the proposed plan? What do you like, what do you not like? Do you like the plan, but you would have tweaked it differently? Or do you see a whole different route to achieve the objectives outlined in The Harmonizer article?

Any and all comments are welcome!

Ed Watson,

CEO, Barbershop Harmony Society

Background for the above photo: When Lunch Break was announced as mic tester for the finals, many folks immediately thought of 2003. In Montreal, yucksters Freestyle decided that no scores meant no rules — many hoped that Lunch Break would deliver an equally wild ride. The audience was not disappointed.

Lunch Break failed to show up on stage after their announcement, eventually being shoved and prodded unwillingly toward the mics the stage hands. Barely acknowledging the audience, they sang through “Make ‘Em Laugh” with the most bored-to-death body language imaginable as they clipped their nails, checked text messages and passive-aggressively shouted what they thought about missing the final round but being required to sing. After a massive ovation, the real fun started.

Shortly into their second song, another semifinalist quartet came through the curtains and pushed Lunch Break away from the microphones, eager for their own moment in the Saturday night spotlight. After a few bars, Lunch Break pushed the quartet aside and continued their second song, only to be pushed aside by another semi-finalist quartet. By the time the second song was over, Lunch Break had bickered with, fought or made fun of all of the other nine semifinalist quartet, each of which got their own shot at the microphone. The above picture shows the final tag.

Beat that caption, PLEASE! The best one gets published in The Harmonizer!

To read the rules, click here to go to the initial post.

Have at it!

Here’s world-famous speed painter Greg Pappas, an extraordinary performing artist who with nothing but a blank canvas and black paint, can create a masterpiece in minutes — all while painting upside-down! He created several masterpieces during contest intermissions, and rarely could the audience guess what he was painting until the art was almost ready to be turned right-side up.

Here he reveals with aplomb his five-minute portrait of 1993 international champ and Hall of Fame quartet The Gas House Gang.

Beat that caption, PLEASE! The best one gets published in The Harmonizer!

To read the rules, click here to go to the initial post.

Have at it!

Here’s 2010 Silver Medalist Old School in the opening round of competition. There are five gold medals in this quartet — and that’s just on the left side! Turns out the veteran power-chorders were in first place after two rounds, but they couldn’t overcome eventual champion Storm Front‘s crazy antics–and Presentation scores–in the final round.

Beat that caption, PLEASE! The best one gets published in The Harmonizer!

To read the rules, click here to go to the initial post.

Have at it!

Here’s the Big Orange Chorus of Jacksonville, Fla. hoisting their ample director, Tony DeRosa, near the end of their set. Tony is quite humorous and self-effacing as the Society’s biggest on-stage ham (in more ways than one), a role where he also shines as director of Tampa’s Sweet Adelines Chorus Toast of Tampa and as lead of 2007 international quartet champ Max Q. The song was about finding a way to get noticed or respect after singing directly after the Westminster Chorus.

Beat that caption, PLEASE! The best one gets published in The Harmonizer!

To read the rules, click here to go to the initial post.

Have at it!

Here’s third-place medalist Ringmasters (the young, skinny vocal dynamos from Sweden) in Philly.

Beat that caption, PLEASE! The best one gets published in The Harmonizer!

To read the rules, click here to go to the initial post.

Have at it!

Here’s the director of The Alliance, Dave Calland, getting CPR during the choruses 6th-place “Geriatric set.” Freebie information if it helps you write a clever caption: Dave is also lead of 5th-place medalist quartet The Allies and president of the Johnny Appleseed District. (Maybe Philly was too much for his heart?)

Beat that caption, PLEASE! The best one gets published in The Harmonizer!

To read the rules, click here to go to the initial post.

Have at it!

Here’s Storm Front yucking it up during their finals “Jukebox Saturday Night” set.

Beat that caption, PLEASE! The best one gets published in The Harmonizer!

To read the rules, click here to go to the initial post.

Have at it!

Want your name and your work in the convention issue of The Harmonizer? Just write something better than my below boring caption for the above photo:

“Voices in Harmony performs “Cruella De Vil” in Philadelphia. The Bay Area, Calif. Chapter chorus, directed by Dr. Greg Lyne, took 7th place.”

Top that! (PLEASE!)

We’ll be adding one new caption contest post EVERY BUSINESS DAY for the next little while — could be a couple of weeks or more. It could be a lot of fun, plus now y’all can get off my back for the … uh … very light posting lately here on the blog.

Each of these photos will appear in the Sept/Oct 2010 issue  (July/August issue is already at the printer, expect it the week after Labor Day). Contest closes when I’m good and ready to wrap up this issue.

Here are the caption contest rules: Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the chance to add/subtract or discuss the list on page 13 of the May/June 2010 issue of The Harmonizer. Apologies if you came to this site earlier and didn’t find this post as mentioned in the magazine. I just came back from vacation to find that the printer had managed to mail the issue nearly a week earlier than scheduled — I thought I was going to have a few more days to put this post online!

If you don’t agree with this list, take it up with me — I take full responsibility for it ….

… unless you do like the list, in which case I emphasize that while the words are mine, the concepts didn’t exactly spontaneously pop into my head. Here in Nashville, especially in the last 18 months, we’ve been talking about issues like these A LOT. I’m sure if I checked back into my meeting notes, I’d see some version of most of the below concepts. But I generated this based on little more than a personal brainstorming session and sent it around the office for feedback.

Hate it: MY FAULT. Like it: THANK THE STAFF. Clear?

So how does this list jibe with your experience? Some successful chapters prominently feature traits not listed below, but the idea is to identify traits that pretty much ALWAYS seem to be present in growing, thriving chapters.

Would you add anything? Remove something? Modify something? Your feedback is appreciated!

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’d like some insight into how I select which stories go in The Harmonizer, here it is. Right or wrong, this is how I see my job as editor of the magazine, and this is how I filter through the many submissions and story pitches I receive. The following e-mail exchange shows a quandary that I face in knowing how to talk about ordinary barbershoppers among ordinary barbershoppers.

It started with an e-mail story pitch I just received from a barbershopper who belongs to a 10-year-old registered quartet that doesn’t compete. They perform about 60 times per year, mostly pro bono at hospitals, nursing homes and retirement facilities. He was inquiring about a feature regarding his quartet. The last part of his e-mail resembles several e-mails or conversations I’ve had:

If I must say so, we are very well received and entertain all of or audiences and are well know in our small cosmos. It is quartets like [quartet name] that is the frontline entertainers to the general public and deserve some recognition with an article in the Harmonizer.

How about recognizing the “trench fighters” of our society? It is great to be a top quartet and compete with the “big boys” and get recognition for GREAT singing but there are many more of us representing the society to the general public than “medal” quartets.

The following is my reply. It includes details about my selection process and some rough ideas I’m trying to pursue. Can anyone enlighten me about how we can give “common” quartets, groups and individuals coverage that would be interesting to the average barbershopper? Any critiques on my present thought processes? Anybody you know who would make for an interesting profile? Read the rest of this entry »

Chapters are constantly sending me clips and links from news coverage they get, mostly from their local newspapers, and sometimes in local and even national magazines. (The above is a recent clip from NEA Today, the magazine of the National Education Association. They got our membership numbers off by about 6,000, but we and Al appreciate the plug!)

Here’s the deal: What these chapters are doing is awesome, and it turns out they’re only sending us a fraction of what’s out there. But I have no idea what to do with most of these clips or how to share them. We already put some of the best on the front page and news section of barbershop.org and also in Livewire. Is that enough? Read the rest of this entry »

As opposed to “What did we start doing that we never should have started?”

This one’s for the old-timers, or at least the historically enlightened. It’s the promised follow-up to my last post, “System reboot: If we’d started the Society today, what would be different?” (In retrospect, maybe today’s post should have come first.) In either case, I’m hoping for some insightful answers and discussion.

We’ve had a lot of wise men among us during our Society’s 72 years. Still do. At headquarters, we have access to every copy of The Harmonizer ever printed, going back to 1941. (And we’d love to digitize all those issues and provide them to our members online. Biiiiiiiig scanning project. Any volunteers?) These old Harmonizers record many trends that have come and gone, some things that never change (style debate anyone?), and occasionally a cringe-worthy image or sentiment from a bygone era that has thankfully not survived to the present.

But what about the stuff from our past that should have survived but didn’t? Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s talk about why your latest Harmonizer is so late and what we’re doing to change that. We ran a Q&A on this subject earlier this summer. I won’t repeat much of what’s there, so if you have any remaining questions, check that post first. For now, here are some basic statements of fact, followed by some details.

Your Harmonizer’s information is not old, it’s just that the cover date has been out of sync.

You’ve still been getting six issues per year, every two months on average, with info that was up to date in the weeks before each issue was sent to the printer. It’s just that ….  (CUE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN) .. if you’d read the previous Q&A, you already know that the actual schedule slippage occurred several years ago as the result of resource decisions made by officers who haven’t worked on Society staff for a long time. (Hint: It’s not any past editor’s fault.)  Just wanted to point out the difference between “causing the slippage” and “failing to fix it in a timely manner.” (DEFENSIVE CRYBABY ALERT OVER) That said, it’s my mess to clean up, and I acknowledge I haven’t been cleaning it up quickly at all.

I feel your pain.

You think YOU find the out-of-synch cover dates embarrassing? The only question staff ever asks me is, “When is the next issue coming out? We’re getting a lot of calls.” I have permanent indents on my bedroom wall because I wake up every work day, remember the day’s date vs. the cover date I’m working on, and the head-banging commences. If you believe heads need cracking to get this problem fixed, consider my cranium thoroughly knocked. My family can tell you, it ain’t a lack of overtime hours that’s responsible for the slow catch-up! (Oops, just let another whiner statement slip in.) Read the rest of this entry »

A sensitive topic here, because we don’t need to eulogize people who are still with us! But I need to come out and ask this: Who are some of the barbershop icons that we need to talk to and interview now, just in case we never get the chance again? Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s answer some frequently asked questions about The Harmonizer:

When am I getting my next edition of The Harmonizer?

It’s in the mail. (I finished it earlier in the week while we were in Ahaheim, so unfortunately, the staff didn’t have time to copy edit a couple of sections!) You’ll probably have it sometime this week, unless you’re in Canada, in which case you’re getting it when Canada’s post office is good and ready to deliver it! (We’re working on that, but a lot of this is unfortunately out of our hands!)

What’s in the upcoming issue?

The cover story is about a barbershopper who is little known outside the Rocky Mountain District, but is representative of some of the other great barbershoppers you’ve never heard of. Phil Ricks — remember that name, but if you’ve never met the guy, you’re not going to. He died a few weeks before I traveled to Rexburg, Idaho to photograph and research the story. He was not known for his singing, but few barbershoppers have brought so much harmony to so many people in so little time.

We also have an interview with Mark Hale where he discusses 14 things any quartet can learn from OC Times, even if they have no competitive ambitions. And we have a recap of the slam dunk Vocal Majority appears at the ACDA convention in March.

More answers about schedule and content after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Not all youth enjoy only the company of other youth.  Most greatly respect older men and want to be accepted and even liked by the Read the rest of this entry »