This weekend was my first barbershop competition: the Northeast District contest in Windham, NH. It was a really great experience; the “competing” part went by too quickly to notice, but the 2-day-long show was fantastic! I’m capturing my thoughts on the experience here.
The Entertainment
In general, the event was hugely fun and entertaining. The participants (particularly the quartets) were super impressive. I wasn’t expecting to become a “fan” of any quartets going into this, but there were several that I now love.
Of course, nothing can be an alloyed good (in my brain, at least). Seeing such amazing talent was humbling; being honest, it was a bit of a bummer. (This is to be expected.) It’s never particularly fun to get a reality check on one’s personal ceilings. These are some charismatic, talented, dedicated performers, and I will almost certainly never reach their level.
That’s totally fine, by the way. I’ve always had a “sensitively-tuned cost/benefit detector” (read – I’m pretty lazy), and I’ve seen very few ‘mountains’ that merited the effort required to reach the top. That doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to be shown photos of the view from the peak, though.
One thing I loved was seeing how many different types of quartet there can be. I’d intuited this fact, but it was a different matter to experience it first-hand. There are comedy quartets, down-the-middle barbershoppers, boundary-pushers, and quartets that do a mix. It really made me start thinking about what kind of quartet(s) I’d like to form eventually.
It also got my juices flowing on my “to sing/arrange” list. I have way more songs to sing than I’ll have years to sing them already!
Performing
Dispositionally, my personal makeup is low on “competitiveness” but high on “self-criticism.” So I really don’t care about performance scores qua benchmarks. However, I am interested in scores as indicators of what to focus on improving, and tend to take that feedback to heart. I also really appreciated the coaching session after the performance; I look forward to having more of those in the future.
One grey lining to this silver cloud (see what I mean?) is that the Matthew Principle was very much in force here. The majority of the talent seemed to come from a minority of the choruses; the winning-est quartets were almost all comprised of members from a couple of top choruses. (Some of these choruses are audition- or invite-only, too.)
This all adds up to the weekend being an awesome experience, but kind of ‘meh’ as a contest.
I’ll definitely see if I can have Sarah (maybe Liam?) come to this fall’s District competition. It’s a great show, and I’d love them to really see what barbershopping can be!