Talk about wired! ...As in cranked up about a foot above the ground and vibrating till you hummmmm....

We left early Thursday afternoon, in three cars, for the four-hour drive to Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. We took along some tapes of a few previous years' international chorus and quartet competitions, so by the time we arrived we were warmed up from humming along with the tapes and anticipating the goodies to come. We checked into the dormitory, then hiked across campus to dinner, in a great gothic hall that looks like it should be filled with Oxford dons.
After a filling meal of mystery meat and cold boiled carrots (I'd forgotten about college cuisine), we headed across the lawn to the auditorium for the first plenary session, which started at 8:00. There were several of these general sessions over the course of the weekend. Each began with general announcements, followed by two superb folks from international headquarters who taught four new songs to the entire group. The idea was to have us proficient in the new songs after four sessions of about an hour each, so that we could perform them in the final session on Sunday morning.
Those of us whose schedule began with a 9-hour course then departed for the first hour of it, from 9 to 10. Mine was "Theory of Barbershop Harmony," dry but informative.

At 10, purely by coincidence, many of us found ourselves at the "Pirate's Cove," the only bar in the county, for a ... debriefing. Because this year is the Society's 50th anniversary, and because there is a special anniversary show package of songs that many chapters (including ours) have performed, there are lots of fairly elaborate songs that everyone in the room knew. Someone would start one of the songs, and in a few seconds the windows and walls would be flexing to those big fat barbershop 7th chords, punched out by a 100-voice chorus of men who'd never seen each other before. Wow.
Now, understand, I'm not a late-night carouser. But at 1:30, when my head finally hit the pillow, it was as if my eyelids were stuck in the open position. Some of those chords were still rattling around in my nervous system, and when I listened to the night sounds between old Charlie's snores, there were little waves of harmony drifting through the trees from other corners of the campus. That ever-present sound of joy and accord...it persisted all day and all night, throughout the weekend. As I came closer to dozing off, it dawned on me: if I didn't pace myself, I might be in real danger of spraining my face from grinning too much.

Up early Friday morning for a sumptuous meal of cereal and delicately chilled scrambled eggs, I waded into the last eight hours of the Theory course, which was nicely bisected by another one of those fun general sessions. Somewhere in there, mid-day Friday, we began to realize that none of us had seen the tenor from our quartet, since...ah...since we had left him the night before, at the Cove. It was becoming clear that our chapter cohorts were expecting us to suck it up and enter the Novice Quartet Competition, but we hadn't rehearsed for quite a while. We launched a late-afternoon search for the tenor, and found him just leaving his room, complaining of a bit of a headache...
We grabbed him and rehearsed for a bit there in the dorm, playing through the pain, as they say, then moved across campus to the auditorium. We took a chance on the auditorium's being empty (during dinnertime), which it was, so we jumped up on the stage and continued the rehearsal right there where the contest would be held the following afternoon. Good grief! We sounded great! It was tempting to conclude that our various problems with this fledgling quartet are simply a function of rehearsal-room acoustics, rather than a need to sing together a few thousand more times. Subsequent events, however, have cast some doubt on the validity of that conclusion.

Then the Saturday classes (both 4-hour sessions, for me) began; what a delight! Sight Reading was first, taught by one of the guys from Headquarters. He's a musical marvel - an extraordinary teacher, with the same kind of enthusiasm and constellation of skills as a great conductor: he can have you learning and performing 'way beyond your imagined limits, in a heartbeat. He sings lead; his voice has a level of purity, accuracy, expressiveness, and absolute control that has earned him the nickname "Laser-Lead." After his class, the other members of our quartet came over to his classroom, where he gave us about 45 minutes of coaching and critique. That sort of thing is priceless. Pearls before swine, maybe, but....
My afternoon class was Vocal Production. It dealt with how to polish up that grisly old voice and make it sound a bit better. Discussion of techniques such as posture, breath control, and relaxation tended to sound kind of Yoga-like from time to time, adding (in my mind) to their credibility. I'm sure that the few remaining imperfections in my own voice are a result of my having to leave the class early to prepare for the Novice Quartet Competition.

So...the Novice Quartet Competition began. There were eight quartets entered. Ours was there by virtue of their having won an informal contest in northeastern Ohio a few weeks earlier, before I began singing with them. (Unless you ask them directly, they probably won't point out that they were the only quartet in that earlier competition.)
Ah, well... we finished 6th. One of the quartets that I expected to kill us choked even more than we did; a couple of others were right on the money and blew everyone away. Our quartet had never been in real competition before, so it was pretty scary (at least for me), although it was obvious that everyone in the room wanted all of us to do well. The event was judged (by some more of the heavy-duty judges) as if it were for the gold, and afterward each judge (arrangement, interpretation, sound, stage presence) met for a few minutes with each quartet to go over the score sheets and provide an extremely thoughtful and constructive critique. Those pearls were really beginning to pile up.

Next, we died and went to Barbershop Heaven. More precisely, we had a barbecue out on the lawn behind the dining hall. I thought I was pretty well wired that first night, so long ago ... but now imagine: coming off the competition: pressure gone, blue polyester safely stowed, beer and ribs in hand, and surrounded - I mean SURROUNDED - by several hundred people who love to sing, who've just learned great gobs of stuff about their craft and have been forced to sit still and relatively quiet all day. Did we sing and carry on? Oh, lordy! It took just about all my remaining store of self-control just to keep from hyperventilating and going face-down in the potato salad.
There were some judge-type guys in the crowd who hadn't been asked to judge the novice contest, but who had involuntarily accumulated a bunch of advice that they needed to get rid of. One of them tracked us down and had us do one of our show numbers for him. He then led us through a highly experimental interpretation of the same song...like, from another planet. He had us turn a four-plus barn burner into a ballad; we heard things about the song and about ourselves that we'd never heard before. PEARLS!