An open letter to the older generations of barbershoppers

Esteemed older-than-I gentlemen,

I am in my late 20s. I am a barbershopper, the de facto assistant director of the Central KS chapter. I’m working on my 3rd official year of membership, and have been singing barbershop for almost 4 years now. I’ve attended 3 district conventions and been to Harmony University twice.

I have come to really appreciate the Society’s way of doing things, to believe in the mission of the Society in such a way that I am trying to do what I can to help get, and keep, the world singing barbershop, harmonizing together. I am struck most strongly by barbershop when I’m at a convention or at HU and I see how many happy people are walking around. The atmosphere is saturated with jovial, relaxed people who always have singing or listening on their mind.

Our world, the barbershopping world, is a world that deserves to be preserved; in order to preserve it, it needs new members. By simple logic, we conclude that many of these members need to be younger so that there are still men to carry the torch in the years to come when we have to get by without your wisdom and guidance.

If you want to recruit the younger generations, I have a request to make, and it takes a little explaining.

First off, I know that you are trying to reach us, and are sympathetic to the fact that we want to be able to sing songs that we’re familiar with, but, please understand, contemporary pop music is not marketed to us. It’s marketed to teenage girls. It’s why so many freaked out about Miley Cyrus’s “dance move"... They were worried about the effect on girls’ expectations for themselves and how they have to act to get boys’ attention.

So, why would younger people want to be around barbershop? It’s the same reason that anyone ever has… The younger folks would join barbershop because a barbershop chord is a barbershop chord! There is so much music that has been produced in the last 120 years, and the music that endures does so because a good song is still a good song.

I am not experienced enough to be able to make a conclusive statement that I know how recruiting younger people will be most effective. What I do know is that I’ve had a number of conversations with other barbershoppers, at conventions and at Harmony U., who seem to think that the key to bringing us in is to have newer songs. Would that help? Sure, I suppose that it could. But, why do we need newer songs? A well-tuned chord a well-tuned chord. Sure, there might be rhythms and such that aren’t in the older songs, but humans love rhythm, so that’s easy enough to adjust to. Is it in the lyrics that the songs feel outdated? I suppose… we younger guys rarely say “at night, dear heart.” But, I recently met a woman whose middle name is Rose, and I find her to be a marvelous woman. If I need an image to fully express “Heart of my Heart,” I can think of her now. I went to high school with a girl named Nelly. I know where Coney Island is, and it’s not hard for me to imagine meeting a girl, having a great conversation with her and feeling almost instantly attracted to her, and wanting to sing “Hello, Mary Lou” with her in mind.

Younger barbershoppers aren’t joining as much as any of us would like, and there are other, more much logical, reasons why we haven’t yet gotten more younger barbershoppers than that there is a dearth of arrangements of new songs being performed throughout the society. Young men watch sports. They read comics. They play war videogames. They work out. The principal commonality between all of these activities is that, relaxed environment or not, loud noises or not, something is always happening. Everything has value. We’ve grown up in a world saturated with information, a world where we could talk to 6 people all around the globe at the same time. My younger brother (mid-teens) probably can’t remember a time when there was no such thing as high-speed internet. And pre-teen boys will grow up in world where there was always Netflix and Hulu ($8/month to watch a plethora of movies and shows without commercials!). It’s not that we’re too busy, that we wouldn’t be open to joining an organization where there’s singing. It’s that we’re accustomed to always being able to find something to do and something that has value to us. Perhaps there are ways to get barbershop meetings to where what goes on is so blatantly worth our time; having new music would only be a part of that.

So, what I ask is that you give us younger folks more credit. It feels a little insulting to know that older generations hold to the idea that younger guys will join if only there are newer songs in the repertoire. Please consider the following: “My Wild Irish Rose” was published in 1899. Even allowing for the fact that it was published at a time when people bought sheet music instead of mp3s and it took much longer for a song to get imbibed into the culture, that song wasn’t new when you joined the society. It was already an “old song.” It was as old to the guys at the Muehlebach as “Annie’s Song” by John Denver and “Piano Man” by Billy Joel are to me. Show us why you love the old songs, and more of us may come to love them, too.

Finally, thank you for preserving the society so that I could be a part of it. I hope that my sharing this is a small step towards our generations’ understanding each other better. I do appreciate you trying to meet my generation’s needs. We probably do listen to some music that you would like, and, perhaps, we can share this music in the coming years.

Yours in Harmony, Michael Tate

What Reluctant, Un-trained Singers Know

There is an expression in Spanish with which many are familiar that translates closely to “I’m sorry.” We English speakers say “I’m sorry” so much (especially those of us in customer service) that I wonder if we’re becoming desensitized to its meaning. Think about it… I have sorrow… I feel miserable and downtrodden, sad that you have so much pain. The commiserating expression in Spanish, however, translates as “I feel it.” We don’t say in Spanish, “this is the condition that I’m in,” we say, “I actively feel the hurt that you feel.”

Schoolchildren are taught that humans have five basic senses, which, if one recalls the wave/particle theory of light, all have to do with physical contact… smell particles, light particles, taste particles, sound waves, and texture.

Through my work in choral music, I am discovering how much I know that I didn’t realize, knowledge that came to me gradually through my commitment to attending my classes and participating in choir, and, thus, being part of quality sound. I learned these things without always thinking about them, but I learned what they felt like. I hold a degree in formal music education, but I believe that that omnipresent teacher, experience, teaches all of us, often imperceptibly. There are things that we know without anyone having to tell us which we don’t discover that we know until we’re questioned about them. Largely as a result of my belief that we often know things without ever being told in words, I had an epiphany recently.

I attend karaoke nights at local cantinas regularly, and I, as my returning readers will know, am seeking out ways to bring more people into the Barbershop Harmony Society, a prominent singing organization. Since I feel that people have a sense for realities without always being cognizant of their awareness, I now present to you two statements that one often hears when encouraging others to sing. The first, that I hear at karaoke nights: “Maybe if I get really drunk.” The second: “I only sing in the shower.” For a time, I felt that I was hitting road blocks every time that I heard these statements, but then, about two weeks ago, my aforementioned epiphany graced me with its presence.

In etymology, we learn that, if a word doesn’t make sense to us, we often can trace its origin back to the physical world. For example, while tutoring this past school year, I learned that the word “auspices” comes from two Latin words meaning “bird” and “to look.” “Auspices” has taken on a metaphorical meaning, “under the protection of,” and, if we think about what people might look at birds for, remembering that members of our species have long observed that certain animals seem to have senses to know when dangerous things are coming, a "bird-looking" was a method of trying to divine the future. University professors might get a little more egotistical if they realized that their university thought that they could predict the future.

In my struggles to overcome people’s reluctance to sing, my reflections turned me, too, to the physical world. Combining my physical-world-has-many-answers mentality and my belief that folks know things even if they don’t know how to express them, I asked myself the simple question, “What do people know about their body that tells them that they’d sound good only in those two states, liquored-up and in the shower?” The answer, as it often does when questions with functional brevity are asked, arrived swiftly like the proverbial “thump on the head.”

We take the epiphany for both venues, first bar singing, then shower singing.

For bar singing, yes, of course, there’s the liquid courage, but where does liquid courage come from? Alcohol is a depressant, relaxing muscles and saddening our mood. When our mood is saddened, and we’re pushing ourselves toward a deathlike feeling, we do things that make us feel alive, that bring out our senses. Since singing is a powerful and personal form of expression, I submit to you that drunk singing is a body’s way of saying, “ I’ve gotta get this out before I die, so that someone, somewhere, will know at least a little bit about what it was like to be me.” Emotional release is part of it, but, as a semi-pro vocal musician, I lucidly understand the importance of relaxation in good singing. Tension in the throat and jaw severely limits free production of sound. In other words, what drunk singers know is that they do sound better when they’re drunk because their voice is freer! But, before any reader goes rushing off to take shots before a concert, remember that, while alcohol relaxes muscles, it also dehydrates. In cave –man speak, dehydration bad. Massaging of the jaw, face, temples, and throat is a much more preferable way to gain the necessary relaxation for quality sound.

As for shower singing, similar to bar singing, there are two aspects (a-“spect”. There’s that Latin root of “to look” again!). The first is audibility while the second is the steam factor.

If an individual has been listening to music all his/her life, said individual is accustomed to hearing pitches. So, if we sing, at least to ourselves, we’re accustomed to trying to match the pitches we hear with the pitches which we produce. The smooth walls of a bathroom provide us with the constant feedback to ensure that the pitches that we expect to hear in songs are the pitches that are coming out of our mouths. Until a singer becomes truly advanced, knowing what different pitches feel like, it’s of paramount importance to hear the sounds that are coming out, to hear what our voice sounds like. In vocal training, singers are often instructed to record their voice and listen to it. The goal is to start to hear the difference that using technique can make. Singing in the shower gives the un-trained singer a ready-made way to accomplish this goal. As to the steam factor, this one provides a practical physical aide to improve vocal quality. The un-trained singer spends little time thinking about the environmental factors which negatively affect the voice; air conditioning, stress, soda (and alcohol), recreational drugs, milk, and lack of exercise (especially the aerobic variety) can all negatively impact a singer’s sound. The steam from showers helps negate these effects and facilitate a positive singing environment; the warmth of steam relaxes the singer, the humidity moistens the vocal mechanisms, and sweat rids the body of toxins (not to mention the pleasant, constant sound of falling water which can relax the mind and provide a steady rhythm). The un-trained singer may not realize that he/she is taking advantage of good instincts, but like the bar singer, it is highly probably that the shower singer does sing much better in the venues of porcelain and pewter.

All this established, for leaders of vocal groups, I suggest the following hypothesis:

If we draw attention to what un-trained singers know intuitively, perhaps we can succeed in encouraging them to control their environmental factors and, perhaps, lead them to our joyful form of self-expression.

Let’s get the whole world singing.

Utilizing Human Adobe

Adobe is not just a computer application for reading .pdf files. It’s a building material. Most of us learned this some time between 2nd and 5th grade. We learned that people out west, including various native tribes and white settlers, made huts out of the earthen material.

A quick wiki search reveals that adobe is used all around the world. Humans, of course, prefer shelter from the elements to un-shelter from the elements, and, being resourceful, use whatever is available to create their shelter. We know that humans can and have done many impressive things in construction. Homo sapiens has become so good at building things that outside observers might be tempted to call us homo constructus. We’ve mastered many methods of constructing in the physical world, but I believe that we could use more practice refining our methods of building up our societal organizations, of building up individuals’ skills and confidence, and in education.

Progress is not simple, but great progress starts with simple steps founded on simple logic. I don’t believe that there is such a thing as common sense (we teach children many of the “common” things that they know), but I do believe in trying to keep things simple. Using comparative logic, let’s look at what it’s like to build in the physical world. If you asked someone to build you something, would you ask said constructor to use materials that he or she cannot acquire? Certainly not. Subsequently, would you expect the individual to use the materials available as well as possible? Certain-ly. Comparing structural practices of organizations, it seems that we use pillar mentality and pleas from authority (“trust me, I know what I’m doing”) to try to increase the functionality of our organizations and to teach. I propose an approach of asking ourselves “What materials are available?”, “How do they work best?”, and then using them accordingly. For example, if I’m working with a barbershop chorus and I find that a particular singer does something really well, like, let’s say, he’s good at singing lightly and freely at E4 (the E in the top space in tenor clef), I might say to him, “Hey, I’ve noticed you doing that really well in the past. This song needs more of that feel. Could you use a little more air support and sing that note louder? You could carry us in that song.”

Therefore, I suggest a protocol of finding the tool, figuring out how it works if necessary (in my hypothetical scenario, this would be encouraging the singer to feel good about his tool so that he keeps it), and then inviting him to use it well at the appropriate time. It really is quite simple. A chorus director can build a good sound by finding quality “material” and making use of it, tweaking the material when necessary. If we want to build up individuals, and build up organizations, we simply need to do like the members of our construction and home improvement community and use what we have and improve it over time.

Fighting Perfectionism

As a barbershopper and encourager of vocal musicians everywhere, I’m trying to bring people into the world of singing, into our organizations. I face a major challenge because people are just not gathering in groups these days. I hear a number of explanations as to why it’s hard to get people to do this. It’s easy to blame television, blame sporting events, or blame popular entertainment in general. I’ve fallen prey to this blame-game as well, but I now have a different answer. I don’t blame television. I blame perfectionism.

Let’s define perfectionism as the belief that entities and humans should always be perfect, and only take action if they can be perfect, and that only perfection is worth our time. To illustrate my point by showing the opposite of perfectionism, take the reality TV scene. You know what it’s doing? It’s exploiting what I believe is an innate human desire to be human. People can listen to a CD if they want music to sound perfect, they can watch rom-coms if they want to see people who look perfect, but humans feel more connected to people who are like them, that is, flawed and passionate.

There’s a darker, more sinister side to perfectionism, but, before I get there, let me be clear on something. I don’t have a problem with the notion of perfection itself. After all, perfection is a beautiful idea, and we could have another discussion about what perfection is. For now, let’s proceed with the idea that perfection means effective and flawless. Anyway, when it comes to perfection, I find that we humans are often afraid to pursue it simply because we think that there’s something wrong with us because we aren’t perfect. We should understand that there’s nothing wrong with not being perfect.

So, on that note, we go back to what it’s like to be a recruiter.

In recruiting others to join societies and clubs, I hear expressions like “you don’t want to hear me sing” and “I only sing in the shower.” I’ll save my thoughts on singing in the shower for another post, but let’s look at the underlying hesitance. Are people saying that they don’t want to sing? Or are they saying that they’re afraid of their own imperfection? It’s hard to know because everyone is different, but what we do know is that there is a hesitance. Some try to recruit to artistic activities like singing, dancing, and speaking in public by treating them as pillars to achieve: “Strive for this, for it is great and worthy of your time!” I don’t like the pillar mentality. I believe in people, and I’ve met my share, and I feel that I can see behind people’s eyes to read people saying, “I feel that I have greatness in me, deep down… If only someone would give me a chance." Many of these people never achieve greatness because they don’t “make opportunities for themselves”. I pity this mentality, and I believe that it is the fault of us leaders that so many people don’t achieve.

We in leadership positions fail when we don’t look for ways to put people in positions to succeed. If we wait for people to tell us that they want something, how much of their time and ours are we wasting when they could have already been succeeding? As a leader, I am fighting perfection by looking for imperfect people and trying to give them chances to pursue perfection. I do this because I find growth more exciting than elitism.

Together, I Can

Writing a blog is five jobs: producer, writer, editor, promoter, and webmaster. It’s strange how something that takes 3 minutes to read takes so much effort.

I find that understanding the five jobs helps me to stay positive and motivated. I’ve found that, for myself, the effectiveness of saying “Oh, just do it!” is not very high; I don’t get much done. I find that a clearer concept of what I’m actually doing, that is, the tasks of what, in the real world, are done by multiple people, helps to truly put myself in the focus mode of each position so that I adequately perform all of the duties necessary to run a successful blog.

These roles, presented in order of appearance, are:

Producer

I function as a producer in being the one who motivates the project and makes it happen. Without the producer in me saying, “Hey, get going! Put your computer in your bag; get down to the library because you know that you can’t get much done in your house most of the time. Look, I’ll put gas in the car if you’re low; it’s fine, stop freaking out. Look, I know that you have ideas, and you really feel that you want to write them down, which is why I’ve set everything up to make it all easier. You can do it. Now, go!” Then, after the writer and the editor have done their job, the producer comes back and says to the editor, ok, now… post it! What are you waiting for? It’s never going to be perfect. Give it to the webmaster! (see below).

Writer

When a person writes a blog, it’s the ideas that get the most attention; it’s the creativity and the delivery that get the attention. I write stuff from my head, my heart, and my guts (if I have enough to say what I truly want to say), and then cross my fingers and pass it along to the…

Editor

The editor does the job that doesn’t get the credit when all goes well; it’s a very thankless position. Yet, without the editor, many people will stop reading a blog or a newspaper. There are even people who won’t read content that isn’t edited effectively. (I admit that there is a Royals blog that I don’t read because, sometimes, the content has bad grammar or is just plain negative-sounding.)

Webmaster

The webmaster receives the content from the editor, previews what it’ll look like on the blog, and posts it. He might also look at the content again after publishing it, perhaps, if necessary, saying, hey, maybe you should look at this again, Mr. Editor.

Promoter

This guy has the work that requires nothing but the excitability of a lottery winner. He simply looks at the content, assumes that it’s cool, gets all stoked, and tries to think of a catchy way to get people to get people’s attention so that they’ll read the blog. On my blog, acting as the promoter, I tweet a tantalizing teaser (hopefully it’s tantalizing!) and then post the address of my blog. I’ve got my Twitter account linked to my Facebook account so that my friends know when I’ve posted. The promoter knows that it’s going to take a while for readership to increase; the promoter simply says to the other 4 guys… I’ll keep getting it out there, you just make sure that what I’ve got to post is good stuff!

Un-valuable Logic

I love Miguel Cabrera as a baseball player. Love him. Hate him because he plays for the Tigers, a rival of my team, the Royals, but I love him. He’s so strong, but he doesn’t try to do too much. Still, I’m mad that he won a certain award this year.

This is why I’m angry. The type of thinking that we try to train out of mental health clients, the type that we try to teach children in schools and young adults in colleges, is given complete credence by so many people when it comes to column-writing and story reporting. Bob Dutton, who is the Royals beat writer, voted for Miguel Cabrera for MVP when he should have voted for Mike Trout. He was going to vote for Mike Trout, and then changed his mind because players said that Miguel Cabrera was better, was, to use Dutton’s words, more “valuable.” Dutton is a beat reporter for the Kansas City Star. I write on a free blog site. Dutton keeps me abreast of goings-on within the world of the Royals. I appreciate his work, especially since he’s been following a terrible team for a long time. While I disagree with Dutton, I suppose that that this an argument that can be made: people who do a job know how hard a job it is. I disagree with Mr. Dutton, and even Tweeted him an argument against his logic, but that’s not my focus today.

My focus is on the logic of people who voted for Cabrera over Mike Trout because of very bad logic. It is against this type of logic that athletes are coached and mental health clients are counseled.

In life, people have stress issues if they worry about things that they can’t control. They have performance issues, as well. I work as an academic coach. I can’t sit and stress about what kind of day the young man had before he came to me. I can only do my best within the 45 minutes that I get to work with him. Lack of focus creates shoddy work. The same is true of athletes, and it’s especially true in baseball. The Royals had a pitcher named Zack Greinke who lives with social anxiety disorder. The Royals, at the time that Greinke was with them, had a very bad defense. Very bad. Zack was taught to only control what he can control, that is, how and where he throws the baseball, and how he plays defense if the ball is hit somewhere in his domain of responsibility. Zack is a freak athlete, anyway, but the increased focus that he found from not stressing about what would happen if the ball were hit to a bad defender who made a bad play, combined with his plan to focus on one pitch at t a time, resulted in an historic season, and he was justly awarded with the Cy Young Award, the award presented to the best pitcher in his league. Greinke was already capable of doing what he did. … The potential was always there. What changed was his focus. In order to focus, he had to clear his mind of negative thoughts.

Now, in baseball, we have three traditional stats that tell us if a hitter is having a good year: batting average (hits per at bat), home runs, and RBI (when one hits the baseball and someone scores (or if the bases are loaded and he draws a walk). If you lead the league in all of these categories, you have won the Triple Crown. Miguel Cabrera did that: .330/44 homers/139 RBI. He also scored 109 runs despite the fact that his principle job is to make sure that other people score… His winning the award is super cool…

Buuuuut… a guy named Mike Trout did this: .326/30/83, scoring 129 runs, in 21 fewer games – he drove in 83 runs despite the fact that that’s not his primary job; and, he stole 49 bases* (Cabrera stole 4). The thing is, Cabrera is a not a good defender. At his very best, he’s average. Trout, on the other hand, is a superb defensive outfielder. In summary, what Cabrera did hadn’t been done in 45 years. However, Trout’s combination of steals and homers has almost never been done. Yet, Miguel Cabrera won the league Most Valuable Player award. Now, to the crux of my temper on the matter:

*Steals are a decent measure of how well a guy uses his speed on the base paths.

It’s not that I have a problem with people voting for Cabrera. One could find an argument or two for him. I think that Dutton’s reasons - basing his vote on whom do other players think should win the award and whom would a manager want in the batter’s box with the game on the line – are weak. Still, they’re, at least, not logically problematic and adolescent. What I have a problem with is the voters who voted for Cabrera based on him winning the Triple Crown. Here’s why.

Just as a pitcher is told to only worry about what he can control, a hitter cannot control what happens to the ball after it leaves his bat, nor the actions of the other guys on the field towards retrieving the ball. He cannot control if a base runner falls down and doesn’t score; he can’t control if he gets a hit even if he hits a the ball super hard. He can’t even control if, in the event that he hits the ball really high and far, it goes over the wall. EVEN MORE TO THE POINT, a hitter doesn’t control where he hits in the lineup; he doesn’t control what managers think of him and whether they’d consider pitching to him in a key situation. RBI is a stat that measure s situations largely beyond the hitter’s control.

I am mad because this stuff is tolerated. I am mad because, in my opinion, we U.S. citizens need to grow up in our thinking and information-processing. This kind of reasoning is adolescent.

Seek and Ye Shall Find...

I often marvel at how marvelously successful people can act so humble. People like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jayhawks men’s basketball coach Bill Self, and a Royals pitcher named Joakim Soria just don’t seem to have big heads. Like, at all.

I think that humility comes from four main sources: competitive perspective – there are other people just as good or better at what one does; cosmic/religious perspective – to the greatness of a deity/size of the universe, one’s individual greatness is as nothing; the understanding that there’s always room for improvement – no one is perfect; and frequency of failure – successful people often fail far more frequently than so-called “failures.”

I’ve felt for a while that I’ll be able to move forward faster in my life if I find humility, so I’ve been searching for it, and I think that I’ve finally found it thanks to the fourth cause of humility – frequency of failure. I’m now an academic coach - what most people call a tutor – and, boy, have I found humility. Most days, even if I understand perfectly the subject matter that I’m teaching, I leave my sessions wondering if I’ve done even the slightest bit of good and wondering if I’ve communicated effectively. Sure, I’ve had a moment of triumph - I found out that one of my students got a B on his Spelling test when he hadn’t passed a single one to that point. Even so, doubts like the following constantly run through my head: “I have six students, and it’s about to be seven. I surely can’t feel that one success with one student means that I’m succeeding with them all. How do I know if I’m doing them any real good? Can’t the rate of improvement always be a little bit higher? Am I moving too fast?

The frequency of failure truly hits home as I practice piano daily. I focus on playing all the notes at the right times, try to balance the volume in both hands, yet I still make hundreds of little mistakes in the hour or so that I practice. Coaching academics gives me so much opportunity to fail. I think, then, that the success is in learning. Success is understanding that failure never has to stop motion. My communications instructor during college says, “Just work to post quality content. Do nothing more. Just try to post quality content.” So, that’s what I try to do with my blog, tweets, with anything that I post on Facebook, with any comment that I make on the radio, and what I do when I try to write songs.

In my efforts to post quality content, I fail so much. I could always say something a little bit better or find a clearer or briefer way to express my thoughts, but I have to fail. I have to fail before I can succeed; and, no matter how much I succeed, more failures wait to creep up and bite me. I was teaching voice lessons to a group of wonderful ladies. Yet, one by one, they dropped out. It’s most likely that they really have just gotten too busy, but I still can’t help but feel that if I’d made the product attractive enough that they’d have found time to continue. It’s not like we didn’t have fun, and they certainly produced more quality sound as we went along, and it’s not like they stopped lessons right after starting. If I ever get to teach voice lessons again, though, I’ve certainly learned what I’ll do differently, even if I never get to work with those ladies again. The loss of the opportunity feels like a very humbling failure.