“Doo, doo doo down doo, doo doo doo doo doo doo down…”
Fourteen girls stand clustered in a tight circle and begin to sway and clap to the beat of the chorus of Mariah Carey’s Always Be My Baby.
Laughs erupt when senior Queen-Tiye Akamefula teases the rest of the group by grooving a little too erratically. Despite the frantic motions of seniors Audrey Stitt and Clara Marton urging the group to observe dynamics, the song breaks down in giggles and a couple delayed “doo doo down”s.
Thankfully for the sake of our productivity, most of the rehearsals for Perfect Pitch, an all-girls a cappella group, don’t end this way. Nevertheless, the general spirit of joyful music making and collaboration rep- resents the way we do things. If you ask any of the other girls in the group, they’ll tell you as much.
Perfect Pitch is special. Most of us have sung in traditional choirs, many at the high school, sometimes for the majority of our lives. However,
the opportunity to arrange and learn and sing in a completely collaborative and creative environment is a singular opportunity unlike any other I have ever had.
The group is entirely independent. Although Mr. Driscoll provides us with rehearsal space and platforms on which to sing for a schoolwide audience, we have no adult to teach us our parts or complain to if some- thing isn’t working out.
Last spring, we began a piece called “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap, which, due to its dissonance and varying rhythms, was extremely difficult to learn. We struggled through it for weeks on end, going over the same measures and chords over and over again until we were frustrated and sick of the piece.
But, when we eventually broke through, we knew it well enough to add the artistry of dynamics and other performance techniques that made Hide and Seek one of our all time favorites and, in our opinion, best sound- ing songs.
Hide and Seek is just one of the many examples we have of our commitment to learning and persevering together. We are responsible to each other. We show up multiple times a week, not out of fear of being marked absent but because we truly care about what we are singing and the people we’re singing it with.
Throughout my four years in Perfect Pitch, I have evolved from a timid freshman, unwilling to offer any input in front of the intimidating upperclassman, into one of the group’s co-leaders. I help run rehearsal and uninhibitedly offer the group arrangements I’ve been working on, about half of which end up as successful performance pieces.
Besides musical ability, Perfect Pitch has instilled in me confidence and the faculty to take ownership of something that asks for nothing but commitment and effort. In return, it provides more than I can express in words.
We aren’t reading from sheet music in a mass of 60 singers and we aren’t standing alone on a stage. We are learning and arranging and failing and singing and trying again, and I am grateful every day for the opportunity to do so.
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