At the Board meeting last Monday, and the rehearsal that followed, we welcomed Andrew Mangal as our Director. Andrew is a graduate of McGill University in Music and was the director of eFusion, a McGill A Cappella group. He and some other McGill grads founded Ardesco in 2005, and they appeared on our show last June, as well as the West Island Sweet Ads show. Andrew has done arrangements for them.

While he is just learning the barbershop style, we can be confident that he will come to enjoy it as much as we do.

Andrew led us for most of last week’s rehearsal and the members all seemed to enjoy his style.

The agreement with Andrew is until the end of December, at which time the Board and he will discuss how things are going, and make a decision on continuing or not. If things continue as they did last week, it will be a no brainer!

Thanks to Lindsay Chartier and Drew Wheaton for their offer to co-direct while we were looking for a director. We were fortunate to be able to get Andrew right away.

Last week we started to learn the Kirby Shaw arrangement of "Lullaby," by Billy Joel. It is a fun piece, and one we will do well with. This was Andrew Mangal’s first evening with us, and he decided to try us out on a new piece. We did pretty well with it.

If you were there last week, you have probably been doing some loo-loos, and even trying the words.

There is a great arrangement by Kirk Young that The Gas House Gang included on their last CD. It is obviously a little different than the Kirby Shaw arrangement, but also is a fun song.

So, after a fun first week, what will happen tonight? Just wait and see!

Question: When does 2 + 2 = 5? Answer: When barbershop harmony is sung correctly, creating harmonic overtones and "expanded sound."

One of the most important factors in the achievement of choral blend and expanded sound is unity of vowel sounds. Vowels are what we sing and sustain, separated by consonants to make words. When we match vowel sounds, we create like harmonics and the sound expands in intensity through reinforcement. In singing, vowels are created through the natural resonance of the human vocal tract. The tongue, lips and jaw are used to fashion the resonators into their vowel shapes. Some basic rules to follow when forming vowel sounds are:

1. When producing all vowel sounds, the tip of the tongue should be placed gently on the lower gum ridge, with the tip barely touching the base of the lower teeth. This helps keep the throat open so the vocal chords can vibrate naturally through the resonators (mouth, throat, and sinus cavities).
2. The jaw should be allowed to relax naturally with a swinging down and back motion.
3. The lips should leave the teeth uncovered.
4. Although the mouth must be open wide, it is not how wide it is open but the shape that is most important.

Every vowel can be sung with one of three mouth shapes: round (example—"oh"), square (example— "ih" as in sit) and oblong (example—"ah"as in pop). Refinements to form each specific vowel sound are made by the degree to which the tongue is arched in the mouth, and the degree to which the jaw is dropped. For instance, both the "oh" sound and the "oo" (as in moon) sound are made with the round mouth shape, but the "oh" sound is made with the mouth as open as possible while the "oo" sound is made with the smallest, most rounded shape.

As we sing the songs in our repertoire, keep in mind the basic mechanics of producing vowel sounds and think about the target vowel sound for each word in the song. Properly matched vowels can enable our chorus of 20-something men to "fill the hall" and create the expanded sound that makes barbershop harmony so much fun to sing and hear.

Vittorio (Vito) Salvatore indicated that he will be joining the chapter, and that he will rejoin the Society in plenty of time to compete with us in the spring.

AndrewMangal will also be joining the Society prior to our next competition.

Talk to somebody about barbershop this week! Our target for members this year is for a 7 member NET INCREASE by the end of 2006. We have had a couple of members, who forgot to pay their dues, so we are down in membership!

Here is our current repertoire list: [mp3] means that the mp3 file is on the Members' Only web site

Practice is something we do at home, every day, between rehearsals!

Rehearsal is where we reinforce what we have been practising every day!

Our Chapter was 56 years old on March 13, 2006!

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