A Capella
I’ve never understood a capella. In college I went to a few concerts and bought two CDs from one of the myriad groups on campus. Even though I enjoyed it, the need to render Radiohead and Weezer into a compressed arrangement of voices always puzzled me. It was like reading the novelization of a movie, or, perhaps more precisely, watching a low-quality pirated copy of a movie instead of going to the theater. But I thought that probably it was just me, that I didn’t understand the art form.
So when I sat down to watch Voces8, an acclaimed English octet, at the National Center for the Performing Arts, I expected insight. I thought that a capella performed by professionals would be qualitatively different from those Friday nights on the quad. And it was, in terms of quality and song choice (less pop, more English ballads), but in the end it was just eight people singing, making sounds, and occasionally snapping to the beat. But if I thought I was confused, it seemed that most of the audience was worse off.
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