On February 4th, u4eeuh, the NVP chapter quartet of which I am a member, had the honor of headlining the 2010 Boise Barbershop Youth Festival.  Now in its second year, this festival is a gathering of several local high school choirs in a celebration of barbershop music, all hosted by the Boise Chordsmen barbershop chorus.  Each high school choir had been working on several barbershop songs (two guy/girl-only songs and one combined piece) and on Thursday they all came together to perform them as a combined choir of nearly three hundred high school students!

Picture this – except with high school students. And only 300 of them.

Now, u4eeuh is familiar with the general attitude of high schoolers towards barbershop.  This attitude could be succinctly described as “apathy.”  In our experience with singing high school shows, the best we’ll get from the audience is a resounding “meh” or “whatever” no matter how well we perform.  However, from the word “go” this event was different.

We were picked up bright and early from our hotel by our host and driver, a young Boise Chordsman by the name of Ed who happens to be considering auditioning for NVP.  We drove to the first of three high schools that we would be visiting that day, and were greeted by James Estes (Student Activities Coordinator for the BHS) and Tori Postma (Master Director for the SAI) who would be the acting clinicians for the day.  We stepped into the chorus in our proper sections to help when we were needed, and were immediately surprised by the quality of the sound.  It was obvious that these students had been working on their music, and time had been spent on it in class.  When, at the end of the period, we were given a chance to sing for the choir, they erupted in applause before going to their next class.

This same pattern was repeated throughout the day at all three of the high schools that we visited.  It would appear that these students were genuinely getting into barbershop, and were excited to hear and sing it.  However, we didn’t understand the extent of this development until the evening show, which u4eeuh headlined.  After fantastic performances by the Boise Chordsmen, several small groups, and the combined chorus, we were welcomed on-stage by thunderous applause.  Now, I feel like we sang and performed well, but never in my history of performing up until that night had I earned three separate standing ovations in one performance.  These students truly appreciated the music that we were putting out there and were responding like it was a rock concert.  One particular moment that stuck out to me was when our tenor Joe blasted a full-voice Eb on the tag to “Happy Together”.  Like he was a lead guitarist wailing on a solo, the audience screamed and cheered their appreciation in the middle of the song.  We were greeted in the lobby by a throng of girls (and some guys) that wanted their event T-shirts or programs signed – once more, unheard of for (most) barbershop quartets.

The tenor was a crowd favorite

I don’t say this to brag, nor to pass this off as a fluke.  Every guy I talked to at the event looked at me straight in the eyes and told me they wanted to keep singing barbershop. Maybe it was their introduction to barbershop in school that got them inside the music, maybe it was hearing the music done by a chorus and quartet that loved and studied the style, or maybe it was the girls thronging for autographs from the singers (I’m going to guess it was the latter).  Whatever it was, these are youth that had previously had zero experience with barbershop that are now planning on joining the society. And THAT is a successful youth movement. Within 20 minutes of our performance, we each had several friend requests from high schoolers that found us through our group on Facebook. After updating our status to reflect our excitement over the event, the comments started piling up. Every single one said how much they loved our performance and some were as specific to say that they really want to sing barbershop now.

Hats off to Con Hobson and the Boise Chordsmen, who put the whole event together.  NVP is very interested in putting something like this together in the Seattle area, so if you’re interested in participating/helping, please contact me at drew.osterhout(at)gmail.com.

- Drew Osterhout