Did you know there's a National Barbershop Quartet Day? This year it happened on a Tuesday, so Melanie and Tyler were celebrating with a t-shirt.
There are four SeaChordsmen-affiliated quartets, all of whom are available for hire for gigs and events. Check out their details on our Quartets page.
A group of SeaChordsmen were honored to attend the memorial service for Jean Osborn, the wife of former longtime SeaChordsmen member John Osborn.
The VLQ performed You've Got a Friend at the beginning of the service, and I Believe at the end of the service.
Our thoughts are with John and the whole family as they celebrate Jean and deal with their grief.
Long-time member Pete let us know that this week would be his last rehearsal with the SeaChordsmen! Pete has been part of the SeaChordsmen family for 20 years, singing both lead and baritone, and serving in many volunteer leadership roles, including President of the Board of Directors. Pete has boundless appetite for fun and new things -- we can't wait to see what his next chapter might bring.
Here's Pete in a VLQ over a decade ago:
And here we are celebrating Pete at rehearsal this week, with cake, and a thank you gift -- a SeaChordsmen scarf:
Getting a day's worth of Singing Valentine deliveries organized and ready to go is no small feat. This crew created products to order, took order details, scheduled both in-person and online deliveries, and managed the day-of logistics for the zoom-delivered Singing Valentines. This list is not a complete one, to be sure! Did I mention that the studio was set up to deliver Singing Valentines from 8am-8pm? Truly a herculean undertaking. Three HUGE cheers for this indefatigable squad, and thank you SO MUCH for making this great day possible for the valentine recipients and singers alike!
We had a handful of established and "pickup" quartets that came together on Valentine's Day to both roam the city, delivering in-person Singing Valentines, and come together in our studio to delivery worldwide online Singing Valentines. It was such a fun day -- check out the quartets who performed:
Mirth:
Metafour:
The Post-It Notes:
This week, the SeaChordsmen had the pleasure of having Donny Rose visit during rehearsal. Did we learn a tag or two? YES. Did we hear about Harmony Foundation International? YES. Did a lucky quartet get some coaching from Donny as we prepped for next week's Singing Valentines? YES. And did Donny come to afterglow and get some more singing in with us? YES.
All the good things. Check it out!
Last weekend, the chorus got together for our annual Board Installation banquet - our first since 2020! We invited folks from the Queen Anne Baptist Church to come as honored guests; we're so grateful to be part of their community. We had a good time chatting, and of course there was some singing:
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The chorus serenaded all of our guests:
The chorus has gotten off to a rollicking start in 2023 -- we've had a board visioning meeting to plan for the next few years of chorus activity and leadership strategy; we've started tackling a dozen new songs for this years (pirate-themed!) Traveling Road-Show; and this last weekend, our directors took time to train some interested chorus members on best practices for being a section lead. We focused a lot on different methods for providing constructive, do-no-harm feedback to singers, along with modeling and building the kind of culture we want for the chorus.
It's inspiring to have so many great and committed singers on our team, and we're also VERY lucky to have such fantastic directors who share their knowledge with us and inspire us to help create our amazing chorus.
A huge congratulations to Frank Gregory for being chosen as this year's Barbershopper of the Year! For years, Frank has led the charge to apply for grants to support chorus activities and outreach. COVID has had a big impact on our ability to raise money. But we still do have bills to pay -- storage for our music and risers, plus rehearsal space at the Queen Anne Baptist Church, and we pay our directors!
As we've lost a bit of our revenue stream, Frank's grant writing endeavors have been even more important than usual, and he's made a huge difference to the chorus.
Our directors go to great lengths to make our rehearsals effective, efficient, and fun. It's a tall order, but they're up to the challenge. What did we do this week at rehearsal?
We had sectional time to work on our Valentines songs (hopefully if you're reading this, you're planning to purchase one!), we did physical and vocal warmups, of course. Then we worked on multiple songs -- one for our competition later this year, some for our Singing Valentines next month, and a few for our upcoming pirate-themed Road Show. We did a quarteting activity to give folks a chance to practice those Valentines songs singing in a quartet; you can tell from the photo above that we had lots of fun doing that.
