Day 5: Chorus Finals and Tags

Today’s the big day!  We slept in for maximum vocal rest, then got some food in order to not have to think about food during rehearsal at 1 PM.  We all gently warmed up our voices (myself having more trouble than the rest), and started getting our game faces on.  We didn’t sing as much as I’d previously expected we would, but we were already locked in and any real work would simply distract us from the job we had to do.  We focused on giving the audience our best presentation, and the fact that we were going to open a lot of eyes to what youth could do.

After a quite a long trek around the entire convention center to avoid most of the crowd (tough while carrying even our minimal props) we finally got backstage.  With a final send-off from our coaches, we marched out and took the stage.  The curtain opened, the lights came up, and we did exactly what we’d worked so hard to do: moved the audience.  Our friends who were in the audience tell us that our ballad had tears in people’s eyes, and that the flashy choreography on our up-tune caused gasps to ripple through the audience.  Overall, we felt thrilled with our hit.  We did what we knew how to do as well as we knew how to do it, and it was now in the hands of the judges how we fared against the other choruses who would sing that day.

I ran back in after the webcast interview (love you Mollie and Jamie!) to see the Toronto Northern Lights do a very clever robot set, with every member covered in silver paint and moving mechanically.  A funny up-tune medley was followed by a moving rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, arranged by their director for the chorus.  After their performance we ran back to the hotel to get changed out of our suits.  We rushed back to the venue just in time to see Westminster take the stage.  In Jamie’s words, it was a superb performance with dynamics so extreme that we had to strain to hear their softs while being blown back in our seats by their louds.  At less than half of the size of the Vocal Majority chorus, Westminster easily exceeded their sound output.  They included clever musical tricks in both of their songs, with a fake tag in the middle of their ballad and seven different chord transitions on their intro (where you usually just get one or two) that brought cheers from the audience before it was even over.  We stayed for the next two choruses (Big Orange and Sound of the Rockies) but as soon as Westminster stepped off of the stage everyone sitting with me had decided that Westminster had just taken the contest handily.

Several NVPers and I went to the local Hard Rock Cafe for dinner, and so got the information about the culmination of the contest by excited text message from Neal.  NVP had taken 12th place out of 26 choruses with an average score of 84.5, once again NVP’s highest score ever at a contest.  Though we were only 12 points away from being in 10th (an average difference of 0.4) and accomplishing our tentative goal of making the top ten, we’re all very happy with how we stacked up against the competition.  And just looking at that score sheet, filled with choruses I’ve known about and looked up to since I was a baby barbershopper, and seeing NVP on it in the 12th place position makes me incredibly proud to be part of NVP.  And of course we were stoked to have Westminster win.  They are our big brothers in barbershop and the inspiration for the original founding of NVP, and we wish them the best.

After dinner we went off tagging in order to demonstrate to our lovely readers what a barbershop convention looks like from the point of view of an insider.  Feast your eyes upon Barbershop Harmony Time!

We look forward to the Harmony Foundation show, the quartet finals, and a special surprise from one of our NVP members tomorrow. Stay tuned!