Every Monday night, a group of women gathers in a Clark College rehearsal studio to renew their quest for the perfect sound. Barbershop-style singers call it “the ringing chord,” a perfectly harmonized blend of tones that gets as sharp and bright as a laser beam.
“It’s like I’m listening to angels,” Columbia River Chorus singer Sharon Rowe said. When all the voices are just right, she said, “an overtone nobody is singing pops out and gives me goose bumps.”
And when she’s not singing, Rowe added, “It’s like there’s an empty hole in my life.”
You can catch up with the Columbia River Chorus’ quest for goose bumps, via ringing chords and other great musical moments, as the group makes a couple of seasonal appearances in Portland. They’ll be singing at 8 p.m. Friday in the Grotto’s Festival of Lights; they’ll also appear 2 p.m. Dec. 14 at the Eastside Church of Christ during a gathering of barbershop groups. Their concert program will include Christmas music, both serious and fun (from “‘Twas the Moon of Wintertime” to “It’s the Most Fattening Time of the Year”), as well as secular and patriotic barbershop favorites.
The group of two dozen voices is a friendly community choir, but it does aim high. It’s a chapter of the Sweet Adelines International, an organization of 21,000 barbershop-singing women, and in addition to private performances it participates in conventions and formally adjudicated contests. It’s a hobby, but its members are dedicated singers who take the weekly commitment seriously and often do some practicing at home, according to assistant director Connie Meuchel. That ongoing commitment is why the group tends toward retirees; younger women are welcome but usually too busy, Meuchel said.
If you’re interested, check out the website at columbiariverchorus.com, or drop by Clark College’s Beacock Music Hall at 7 p.m. on a Monday night. Just follow the sound of close harmony.
“It’s an incredible opportunity to develop your voice and your technique, but it’s more than that too,” Meuchel said. “We work together in lots of ways.” Meuchel, who’s been with the group for 40 years, said she’s built skills along the way like music teaching and nonprofit administration too.
But group’s real magic is a basic harmony between music and friendship. “It’s a bit of a support group. You form close relationships with people,” Meuchel said. If you stick around long enough, she said, you’ll form deep bonds as fellow singers go through significant life passages — births, deaths, everything in between.
“That’s a big part of what keeps me coming back, the caring friendships,” said director Paul Olguin, who started with the group eight years ago. An acclaimed barbershop singer, arranger and songwriter, Olguin said the all-female Columbia River Chorus has presented him a unique challenge.
“Women’s voices sit in a narrower range overall,” Olguin said. “That makes it both wonderfully easy and incredibly difficult at the same time.”
Reach for it!
Ease and difficulty were both on display during a recent Monday night rehearsal. Olguin would launch the group on a piece, signal a pause after a few passages and then check their pitch against a little pitch pipe. Time after time, the chorus — which continued to sound pretty sweet — had collectively fallen a bit flat from where it began.
“Staying accurate is a real challenge when you don’t have any accompaniment,” Olguin said. The answer, he coached the group, is energy and careful attention. “It takes effort not to lose that bright, vibrant key,” he told them. “Keep reaching for it! Reach for it!”
To help them reach for it, Olguin frequently belted out the note they were after — demonstrating strong, steady notes that went far higher than the typical range for a typical male singer. Olguin also warned the baritones and basses: “You are so awesome and powerful, but right now you are burying our leads. Can you back it off just a little? Without losing any of that brilliance and roundness?”
Meuchel said barbershop groups are trying to create an overall “cone shape” in sound — with the bottom layers, the basses and baritones, providing a wide- and solid-sounding foundation and the upper layers, the leads and tenors, forming a thinner, lighter-sounding point as they stretch higher.
That’s a subtlety contest judges are on the lookout for, singer Patty Thoennes said. “They grade you on specific barbershop arrangements and chords and sounds,” she said. “What they’re looking for is very precise.”
“They say barbershop is the hardest style. It’s very complex,” said Joyce Engel, the longest-tenured member of the group, who joined in 1974 and said she keeps coming back because “God gave me a gift, and that gift is to sing. Everyone is on a journey, and this is mine.
“Barbershop is like a puzzle,” Engel said. “But if everybody is on the right note, it completes the puzzle.”
