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(or my experiences in the Harmony Sweepstakes)
I have gone back and forth about whether to write this month’s column as an insider’s view of the Harmony Sweepstakes experience. I’ll be honest with you. I had planned since before I started writing this series to share some of my experiences at the regional and national rounds of the event. That was all well and good when I thought that we would win this year (everyone thinks they’ll win, don’t they?).
But reality didn’t match my expectations, so I’ve been unsure how to approach it. I thought of just not mentioning it. But I guess that would just be copping out. I was still of two minds on the subject, but my editor at CASA.org convinced me that it was probably something that people would be interested in, even if it didn’t end up the way I wanted it to, so I’m going ahead with it. Way to spoil the ending, eh? That’s alright. The journey is more important, this time around.
Some Background
For those of you who don’t know about it, there is an a cappella competition every year for groups of from three to seven voices. The Harmony Sweepstakes A Cappella Festival (www.harmony-sweepstakes.com) is called a festival, but everyone who’s had anything to do with it knows that it’s a competition. The regionals are held in the first quarter of the year in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pacific Northwest, Denver, Chicago, New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. The national finals are held in San Rafael, CA in May, and there really are some audience members out there who have attended every one of the 22 final shows.
Aside from a time limit (10 minutes in the regionals, 12 minutes in the finals), there are no limitations with regard to style or content. There are usually representations from barbershop, gospel, doo-wop, contemporary/rock, and vocal jazz styles. That’s probably quite enough background. If you want more, or if you’d like to see who’s won in the past, go to their web site and you can explore all of that. The following is going to be a sort of combined description of how the thing went for the a cappella quintet I sing with, Clockwork, over the course of the 2004 and 2006 competitions.
In February, 2004, Clockwork entered the sweeps on a lark – mostly because we figured that participating in the San Francisco regional was the easiest way for us to show what we had been working on in private over the past half-year or so. It was the only audience we could think of that might have a chance of understanding what we were going for. We knew with a fair amount of certainty that we wouldn’t win, because all of us had the impression that a jazz group just wasn’t going to fit in very well. We’d seen boy bands with lots of vocal percussion and an occasional barbershop quartet or comedy take top honors at the regionals, but not a jazz group. We admitted to ourselves that we were out of the mainstream, but it’s the music we like to sing. In 2004, we approached it more as a showcase than a competition.
The results were announced, and all of us were really disappointed when we didn’t place third or second (they’re announced in reverse order. We all assumed that it meant we hadn’t even placed in the running. When it was announced that we’d won the San Francisco regional competition, also capturing the award for best arrangement, we were completely surprised. Surprised and inspired. We did more in all phases of the group in the three months between the regionals and the finals than any one of us could have dreamed. We recorded a six-song CD, thanks in large part to production help and studio time from a good friend, Phil Schroeder. We actually produced and had the CD (our Orange album) ready to sell just in time for the finals, which was a big goal of ours. We added new material to our queue as songs to learn. We lined up some additional gigs and performance opportunities. And we started working, if briefly, with Richard Bob Greene of The Bobs. He came in and gave us some advice on how to improve our staging and general performance skills as a group.
Again, fairly convinced that we didn’t stand too much of a chance of winning the finals (we’d performed together only a handful of times in public by then), we surprised ourselves and a lot of other folks by placing second to Chapter 6 in the 2004 finals. Despite the long odds, it turned out that being the bridesmaid of that year was a little disappointing. Chapter 6 was entered in the finals for the third time in six years, so they really knew what they were doing when they won it. There was no shame in coming in second to them. But after resolving that we probably didn’t need to go through the whole experience again for only the chance of moving up one spot in the final rankings, we figured that we were done with it.
In 2005, as the reigning San Francisco champs, we hosted the regionals that sent Moodswing to the finals. That was fun, and a whole lot less stressful, since we had nothing to lose, and only new fans (and a few CD sales) to gain.
Being pretty much local to the event, we even ended up setting up a table at the finals in 2005 and selling a few CDs while some old friends of ours from the Pacific Northwest won the national title that year as members of Groove For Thought. Kelly and Kevin Kunz had both been in high school and college groups at the same time as Angie, John and I, so it was kind of nice to see folks we knew doing well.
A year later, with some pretty cool performances under our belts, a new full length CD (“Tesseract” was produced by Richard Bob Greene), and a minimal number of regular performing opportunities, we started thinking about returning to the sweeps. The final decision was based on the following logic: The regionals, and (assuming we could win that again) the national finals would present us with a total of well over 2,000 audience members. Those who had heard us before would probably be hearing new repertoire from the last time they’d seen us, and those who hadn’t heard us before would represent new potential fans. Again, assuming we could win the regional competition, we would actually have another performance to look forward to, since we’d be able to host the regionals again in 2007. That line of thought finally won out, and we dropped our name into the hat again for the 2006 Sweeps.
A Closer Look At The Experience
The Regional event starts with a sound check at around 4:30 on the day of the concert. Nothing against the professionals who run the event’s technical side, but it is a safe assumption that the sound will most likely be a little problematic for this kind of thing, no matter what you do. Instances of a microphone being turned down at the beginning of a set, funky monitoring situations, and sub-optimal equalization are par for the course. In fact, the ability to perform despite such inconsistencies and impediments is probably just part of the gauntlet you have to run in order to do well.
Sometime during the sound check process we learned what the order would be for the concert that night. At that point, a group has to decide what they need in order to be at their optimal energy level and vocal shape for whatever time they’re going to be on stage. In 2004, that meant that we went out for some deli sandwiches and then I ended up taking an unexpected nap back stage during part of the first half. It had been a long day and we were on deep in the second half. In 2006, we closed the first half of the show, so some of us actually got to watch the second half from some empty seats in the house.
I should mention that this year’s regional event put us up against some good friends, as well as some excellent vocal groups, so the competition was a little difficult from that end. We’ve shared the stage with One Of Each, RoShamBo (a group I even sang with for a while), Dis Moi and HouseBlend before. We ended up going out for drinks afterward with some of the RoShamBo crowd and a quartet of guys from Los Angeles, The Blanks. That left only six individual singers in the whole concert that we didn’t either already know or end up hanging out with by the time it was all over. And four of those were underage girls in an award-winning Sweet Adelines quartet called, appropriately enough, Underage. Hanging out back stage with friends is probably a lot more common in the regionals than in the finals, since most of the groups are local, and many return from year to year. But there can be some very good friendships forged between participants in the nationals as well.
For example, the host group in the 2004 finals (by virtue of having won first place in 2003) was The Idea Of North, a wonderful jazz quartet from Australia. I’ve maintained friendships with those folks since meeting them at that event. We hosted them for a couple of shared concerts in 2005, and we’ve kept in touch often. In fact, Nick was the one who finally got me to load up Skype recently, so that we could talk to each other instead of just writing emails back and forth.
At this year’s finals, I made some more friends from various parts of the country with whom I expect to keep in touch, as well. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The judges have some very hard work to do. They are usually industry insiders or a cappella pros who sit on the panel for one competition and then sometimes may in future years. They are tasked with evaluating the performances of a wide range of styles, basing their judgments on the overall quality, not simply what style of music they prefer.
A bunch of groups really brought their A game to the regionals this year. Fortunately, we did, too. We won the judges’ award for best group, as well as the audience favorite award (something we hadn’t done in 2004). Winning the show was a goal for us, but the audience favorite award meant an awful lot to us, too, since we’d really been trying to improve our connection with the audience and our overall stage presentation. Being a notes-oriented group that spends most of our time working on the musical aspects of our material, those other aspects of our performance sometimes get short shrift.
Preparing for the nationals this time around, we had already decided to do pretty much the same set as we’d done in the regionals. We added a new introduction to Donna Lee, and we added back the two verbal introductions we’d cut because of time constraints. We had chosen material that had always been pretty dependable in our shows, so we were pretty confident that musically, we didn’t have much to do in order to be ready for the next round.
We chose to concentrate a lot on our look, which had inspired some suggestions for improvement when we’d done shows like this before. We even went to the extent of making or commissioning some pieces of clothing. That’s not including the many shopping trips and evaluation sessions we went through to come up with something right for us. We’re not what you’d call a quintet of fashion models. Some of us (myself being the prime example) might be described as having good bodies for radio or the recording studio. Even so, we came up with some clothing options that didn’t stoop to the level of being uniforms (which we decided wasn’t appropriate for our group), but didn’t come off as being too casual (a criticism we’d heard in the past).
The national show experience is a little different than the regionals. First of all, there’s a reception on Friday night before the Saturday concert. All but one of the groups had arrived in time to attend that, so it was an opportunity to get together over some drinks and get to know each other a bit. I’m pretty poor at remembering people’s names, so I created a cheat sheet for myself (and made a few extra copies) with names and pictures from the various groups’ web sites.
Aside from getting to hang out together, one piece of business is transacted at the Friday night reception. The order for the regional concerts is up to the producers to figure out. But for the national finals, it is left up to a random drawing, which avoids any taint of favoritism. The group names are placed in an urn or some other container, and someone draws them out, one by one, to determine the show order for the next night. The drawing also determines the sound check order (reverse of the show) to take place on Saturday afternoon.
After the drawing, since there were two barbershop groups in attendance, there were tags to be taught and sung, and mixed quartets, quintets and octets to be tried out, and so on, and so on. If you haven’t hung out with barbershoppers before, well, they DO like to sing... But truth be told, I was hanging out with them until we all finally got too tired (and too hungry) and we finally dispersed.
On Saturday afternoon, the sound check was pretty uneventful. Nobody on stage really has much control over the house sound, and they leave it up to the professionals to fill the house with the appropriate levels and EQ. The most any group can really go for in the limited sound check time available (nine groups in two hours) is to get an overall level and mix for the stage monitors that works for their group. Often there are specific mics or channels for the basses and for vocal percussionists, so folks learn where their microphone is going to be set up. Other than that, it’s pretty much up to the house sound guy to figure out.
This year, Hi-Fidelity brought a very nice omnidirectional microphone that both of the barbershop groups ended up using. Since they’re not traditionally mic’d individually, it was a very good solution for both groups. Most of the contemporary a cappella groups prefer individual microphones, though. I brought a special mic that I like to use for bass singing, but it was easy to integrate into the house sound. The general rule is that if anyone has special microphones to use, they offer to allow anyone else to use them, as well. That keeps the playing field even for everyone, and in the case of Hi-Fidelity’s mic, both quartets (and the audience) benefited from the change.
Since we had placed second two years ago, Clockwork had some fairly high expectations. However, we knew going into it that there were variables out of any group’s control that would be worth more in the end than what we could control ourselves. The first (and this is a very big variable from year to year) is the taste of the judges. Some times you simply get a panel that’s into what you’re doing more than others. It isn’t supposed to make a difference, but it can. The other factor that was completely out of anyone’s control was the quality of the other groups in the program.
This year’s show was particularly strong. Bad luck for most of the competing groups, but good luck for the audience (and those of you who purchase the CD of the show when that comes out). When I heard Hi-Fidelity sing their set, I knew we were going to have to really be a hit with ours to even get close to them. Then Regency went out and just took over the stage with a doo-wop sound that I thought was much better than any of the reunion shows I’ve seen on public TV.
And The Winners Are…
When all was said and done (and sung), we had pulled a Michelle Kwan. Two years of intense rehearsing and experience, developing more difficult material, improving our stage presentation, and maturing significantly as a group allowed us to move from second place in 2004 to third place in 2006. Hi-Fidelity smoked everyone else on stage with their polished Addams Family shtick, and their VERY impressive rendition of a Bye Bye Blackbird parody that had 24 key changes in it. They were placed first by the judges and also won Audience Favorite. Regency placed second, thanks in part to their lead singer’s amazing dance steps and their soulful and impressive vocal skills and arrangements.
I won the David Lichtman award for best original arrangement, which was a very nice personal honor. But as many sports stars have said, the individual honor doesn’t seem to mean as much as a team championship might have.
I should mention something about the awards themselves. In years past, there have been sponsorships by various organizations and companies. As of 2004, Shure microphones and the DiskMakers CD publication service were sponsors of the events. That meant that as regional winners, we eventually received a set of Shure SM-58 microphones and a duplication package for 300 CDs at DiskMakers. The winners of the national title that year won a set of wireless microphones. The prizes we won in 2004 were certainly used to further our musical goals.
This year, for winning the San Francisco regional competition, we were awarded a Scrabble game. You read that correctly the first time. For placing third in the finals we won, fittingly enough, Monopoly. For winning the arranging award, I was awarded a plastic light-saber.
So just in case you think there’s fame and fortune at the end of the Harmony Sweeps rainbow, please note that such is not the case for most people who participate. I’ve spoken about this with members of two of the recent national winners, and both of them reported similar findings. The only real reward for winning is bragging rights and some enhanced press kit credibility. I noticed that the winners of the Pacific Northwest this year received a very nice engraved Lucite award for their win. The folks up there certainly know how to take care of business! The actual award is actually left up to the regional producers.
So go out and enter your regional Harmony Sweepstakes competition. It’s an opportunity to show what you’re doing, to perform in front of a friendly and appreciative audience that knows a lot about a cappella, and you might even earn some bragging rights.
If you’d like to see some pictures of the event, you can check out the blog written by Clockwork’s own Eric Freeman (http://www.aetravels.blogspot.com). And if you want to know what happens on the Monday after your Sweeps experience, read the first column in this series. I’ll see you back here in June.
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