The kickoff concert beginning the one year celebration of the 100th took place at Woolsey Hall on January 31. I rushed to put my plans together in the last weeks, knowing I just could not miss this. The original group had formed in January of 1909, so January 31, 2009 seemed the perfect date for this concert.
What a turnout! Some 2400 people packed Woolsey Hall. It took over an hour to get everyone seated. I was unable to secure reserved seating and ended up in the 2nd balcony. In Woolsey, this is the nosebleed area. But I could see everything and Woolsey's acoustics are fantastic.
As I read over the program, I saw some of my buds, some classmates, others teammates on the Songbook project, were performing. First, the Replicants, a quintet doing a handful of the songs done by the first Whiffenpoofs. My excitement about what they would perform began to grow as I realized I had only recently been asked to engrave some very early arrangements.
Waiting for the audience to filter slowly in, I began to jabber with the lovely young undergrad sitting beside me. We had a little exchange about the upcoming performance, I got to brag about working on the almighty Songbook and how my buddies and colleagues would soon be on that stage, singing music they had probably learned from my charts. She acted interested for a bit, and then her older sister leaned over and said, "Isn't my baby sister smart? She's in the eighth grade, you know!" We all had a big laugh on that one.
Finally, the show begins
And then, it did indeed happen as I expected. My buds sang the songs I had engraved. "Old Grey Bonnet" and "When Pa" which I had engraved in the run up to this concert, and "And When the Leaves" which I had puzzled over in the Songs of Yale. It turns out these were among the very first songs the founders experimented with developing this new sound. The performance flowed through the years from 1909 to the present, through all the decades with the SLOTS and other alumni groups covering the entire breadth of the 100 year repertoire. All the songs I had engraved, and essentially had learned, note for note, part by part, verse by verse, all were poured out before me. I soaked them up as few people ever could - knowing more than any man deserves to know. It was rich.
Then the Whiffs of 2009 capped the show, and again I was blessed to know this repertoire just as intimately. But this time, I also heard the inaccuracies here and there that have crept in during years of singing from unreadable charts.
Whenever the Whiffs perform on campus, one of their singers has a job to dress outrageously - he is the group "Turkey". I had not realized this tradition which began with my 1973 group had been carried on to this day. But as the Whiffs marched on stage and I saw one guy in a costume that made it appear he was crouched inside a golden cage and being carried by a gorilla. I instantly knew what I was looking at the group's Turkey. In my group, Turkey wore white sneakers to every show, which looked pretty outrageous with white tie and tails. These days, I learned a different costume is rented for every on campus performance, and the budget numbers thousands of dollars.
Did I mention the group sang incredibly well? This is an exceptional band of Gentlemen Songsters and they brought the house down.
Singing from readable charts
In literary analysis, I had learned that when ancient texts like the Old Testament were passed along by oral tradition, passages that were complex or incomprehensible were often "glossed" over time. Scholars are able to identify these glosses through various means, one of which is comparing various transcriptions and looking for points of deviation. In any case, I could hear glossed sections in some of the music in this show. We had glosses in my time, too. There were sections of the music we just did not get or maybe could not read. We might have heard these sung in the oral tradition and sang it as we'd heard it, or in some places we invented our own glosses.
There are probably sections of some arrangements that have not been sung as they were intended since their first performance. Is any of this bad? No, not really. Often the glosses are clever inventions to fill in a gap that can't be groked by a group. But some strong and powerful intentions of the arranger are lost, and sometimes that invention is far superior to any gloss.
So our work will restore these original intentions and inventions. This is especially gratifying when I get to meet the arrangers now, shake their hands and tell them we've unearthed their original work. I met one of them at the After Glow party that evening.
Black, black, black is the color...
If you know the Whiffs, you probably know "Black Is the Color". It was arranged by the great Fritz Kinzel '58. I spotted his name tag and introduced myself. Our Songbook musicologist, Charlie joined me and we engaged Fritz in a spirited discussion of his work, of the legendary 1958 group and also discussed the stunning performance abilities of our host 2009 group. What a treat! I wanted to ask him about the strikingly modern and nearly incomprehensible chords he used in Black, and somebody brought it up before I did. Well, he said, those aren't any true chords. They are color splashes I made up. The fact that anyone can actually sing these chords is a testament to the abilities of Whiff singers over the years. Fritz is also the arranger of "Johnny One Note" and "Delia". I always loved "Johnny One Note" but did not appreciate the craft of the arrangement until I engraved it a couple months back.
My New Arrangement for the 100th
To cap the evening, I gave Pitchpipe Brian Mummert a new arrangement of mine, which I dedicated to the Whiffs on their Centennial, "Angel Eyes". I'm giving them right of first refusal on a piece I began developing a couple years ago and has evolved and been refined up to this moment. What a thrill it would be to hear the Whiffs sing another arrangement of mine, this one from the 21st century!
Singing from readable charts
In literary analysis, I had learned that when ancient texts like the Old Testament were passed along by oral tradition, passages that were complex or incomprehensible were often "glossed" over time. Scholars are able to identify these glosses through various means, one of which is comparing various transcriptions and looking for points of deviation. In any case, I could hear glossed sections in some of the music in this show. We had glosses in my time, too. There were sections of the music we just did not get or maybe could not read. We might have heard these sung in the oral tradition and sang it as we'd heard it, or in some places we invented our own glosses.
There are probably sections of some arrangements that have not been sung as they were intended since their first performance. Is any of this bad? No, not really. Often the glosses are clever inventions to fill in a gap that can't be groked by a group. But some strong and powerful intentions of the arranger are lost, and sometimes that invention is far superior to any gloss.
So our work will restore these original intentions and inventions. This is especially gratifying when I get to meet the arrangers now, shake their hands and tell them we've unearthed their original work. I met one of them at the After Glow party that evening.
Black, black, black is the color...
If you know the Whiffs, you probably know "Black Is the Color". It was arranged by the great Fritz Kinzel '58. I spotted his name tag and introduced myself. Our Songbook musicologist, Charlie joined me and we engaged Fritz in a spirited discussion of his work, of the legendary 1958 group and also discussed the stunning performance abilities of our host 2009 group. What a treat! I wanted to ask him about the strikingly modern and nearly incomprehensible chords he used in Black, and somebody brought it up before I did. Well, he said, those aren't any true chords. They are color splashes I made up. The fact that anyone can actually sing these chords is a testament to the abilities of Whiff singers over the years. Fritz is also the arranger of "Johnny One Note" and "Delia". I always loved "Johnny One Note" but did not appreciate the craft of the arrangement until I engraved it a couple months back.
My New Arrangement for the 100th
To cap the evening, I gave Pitchpipe Brian Mummert a new arrangement of mine, which I dedicated to the Whiffs on their Centennial, "Angel Eyes". I'm giving them right of first refusal on a piece I began developing a couple years ago and has evolved and been refined up to this moment. What a thrill it would be to hear the Whiffs sing another arrangement of mine, this one from the 21st century!
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