Somewhere There's Music: A Capella as an Art of History & Evolution

This fall I joined an all-female a capella group on my college campus. The story of the group goes like this. In the fall of 1971, a group of eight women gathered under an arch to sing a four-part arrangement of Ella Fitzgerald’s “How High the Moon”. We still sing that founding melody today, always with our arms around each other, bending our knees at the same part of the song, how near, how far. I wonder if, while singing, those first eight women smiled at each other as we do now. I wonder who paused outside the arch on the cold fall evening to listen to this sudden music. I wonder how it sounded from further away, whether it reached people from a distance, urging them to venture closer. I wonder if anyone was scandalized by women taking up space in this audible way. What would this have been like, women brave in the face of restriction and marginalisation? Somewhere there’s music, we sing now. Then again: somewhere there’s music.

I was in an a capella group in high school, but this experience has been completely different. In high school, we created new arrangements and performed them as we learned them. We didn’t have a history of musical arrangements from which to draw. My current group, though, is deeply concerned with maintaining a connection to its musical and historical past. When I sing, I feel like I am helping to make tangible the sounds of the past, bringing to life a historical record of women’s empowerment.

Despite the great attention to cherishing musical inheritances, the group learns and performs new arrangements each year. The culture maintains its emphasis on sisterhood, but it also changes. It becomes less strict, rethinks the implications of more dated songs. Thanks to the time and energy of past and current members, the group has become more financially independent, more accessible to people of all financial backgrounds, now able to get rid of expensive member fees.

Without a reliance on instruments, a capella is an independent, brave, and vulnerable form. I remember my first performance with the group, the white air of our breaths, the heat of our collective sound, and the students gathering to support us. I believe that a capella singing is an exercise in humility, in truly listening to other people, not to respond or knock them down, but to meet them where they are. After first getting into the group, the older members snuck into my room and sung me awake. They took me and the other new members outside, sang to us all. It was still early morning. We were in a circle, our arms around each other. This wasn’t for any audience but a sincere form of welcome, a doorway to warmth. The way their voices washed over me, no cold could touch it.