First Encounters with A Cappella Rush:
An Ethnographic Introduction
Two and a half weeks into my first semester teaching at Yale (Fall 2005), most of the students in my seminar on contemporary Asian theatre and music started arriving late, breathless, uncharacteristically fuzzy-headed, occasionally sleepless, and generally under-prepared for discussion. Having just maneuvered uncomfortably through the still unfamiliar ritual of shopping period, I was unsure how to interpret this new behavior.
Yale Culture Note 1
Shopping period occurs during the first seven to ten teaching days of each semester at Yale. With a strong sense of purpose and the fresh enthusiasm that a new – as yet unsullied by assignments – semester engenders, Yale undergrads (and some grad students) ‘sit-in’ on two or three times as many classes as they will actually take in the semester. Despite the possible administrative convenience to the university in terms of room scheduling, teaching-assistant assignments, book orders, and IT support, the idea of pre-registration is anathema to Yale students. “Offensive,” “stifling to intellectual and academic freedom,” “a rupture of tradition” are descriptions I have heard from more than one student. Indeed, from the perspective of most Yale undergrads lucky enough to have a bit of space in their semester schedules for electives, shopping period is an Inalienable Right. During those glory days of shopping period, students rush in and out of classes, leaving early, arriving late, tearing from one side of campus to the other, sizing up potential professors and the intellectual and personality types that might eventually make up the student constituency of each class they are considering. It is a time, as one student with a sense of humor informed me, when “undergrads rule and professors drool.” He and I also agreed that turn about is fair play: as soon as students commit to a course the professor holds all the cards.[1]
From the professorial perspective, especially for those teaching courses not required for any particular major, shopping period can be a grueling rite of passage. It is a time to feign a certain nonchalance and emotional distance from the selection process. Faculty cultivate an aura around themselves that is a complicated mix of bravura and self-deprecation. The feelings of schadenfreude for those colleagues who woefully admit to you that they have had only three people ‘shop’ their seminar and deep (albeit unreasonable you say to yourself) fear that no one will actually decide to take your course oscillate and vibrate through one’s core.
The arrival of the end of my first shopping period had been a great relief to me. About 18 students had passed through the neo-antiquated portal of my classroom in William L. Harkness Hall during shopping period.[2] When I discovered that some six of them had decided to enroll and then actually found them seated and smiling on the chalk-dusty chairs in the classroom, I was grateful to them and silently vowed to give them the best course they would ever had. I was geared up for the class meeting, expecting them to be their usual engaged selves. Hence, this new sleepy lackadaisicalness in my students was confusing to me. Surprised, I wondered if this was how students at Yale really behaved once they decided to enroll in a course. Perhaps it was the case, I theorized, that once the drama of shopping period was over the students fell immediately into the lethargy that I had come to associate with the seventh or eighth week of the semester at other universities. As I surveyed the murky-minded, mumbling bodies sloping ever-downward towards the flat solace of their desks, I found it difficult to recognize the eager and engaged people who had populated the space just a few days ago.
After delivering an unplanned monologue on the readings I had assigned for class discussion, I noticed that a few of the students seemed slightly more alert. Rounding off my soliloquy and always believing in direct communication, I sat informally on one of the tables and asked them to explain to me why it was that they were all so tired. Shifting in their chairs, they looked around and grinned sheepishly at one another. The boy who was the most alert – that is, only slouching not snoozing – began explaining that after the Dwight Jam several Friday evenings previous when they had been up all night singing and shrieking and partying, they had held auditions for new members to join their various a cappella groups all weekend. The auditions had run, in some cases, from eight in the morning until midnight or later, with only a few breaks. They had had no time to sleep or do their reading for more than a week. Since the Monday after auditions, their days had been overflowing with commitments to attend rush meals, engage in covert lobbying of their favorite candidates, and intensive preparation for their various groups’ Singing Desserts.
Yale Culture Note 2
A singing dessert is the first official, full-length concert of a Yale a cappella group in any given academic year. They occur during the rush period, carefully scheduled not to conflict with the singing dessert of any other ensemble. The location of these concerts is often semi-secret so that competing groups may not block or prevent freshmen auditionees from attending rival groups’ concerts or plot to disturb the concert by creating a ruckus of some sort. “Not that that sort of thing has happened recently,” said one person in my class (Junior 2005).
As the student continued to outline all that he had been doing over the last week and a half, the rest of the class members stirred themselves out of their torpor and began, in surprisingly animated fashion, to add their own list of commitments to the – now communal – litany. They laughed and rolled their eyes to various bits of news, comment, and reports about the trials and tribulations of being rush manager, a job that two of them (both sophomores) held in their respective groups. I could see several class members judiciously taking mental notes, assessing the competition, as they discovered that some of their own favorite potential new members were being eyed (eared?) seriously by other groups.
Despite their attempts to enlighten me, I was still confused. Dwight jam? Rush meals? Singing desserts? What were these apparently gustatory events, the mention of which animated even my most somnambulant students? Thus began my initiation into and interest in the world of a cappella singing at Yale.
A Cappella at Yale
Yale hosts more than twenty different undergraduate a cappella singing groups, some fifteen of which adhere, for the most part, to the byzantine rules and regulations of an umbrella organization called the Singing Group Council and at least five or more others that are considered alternative or independent and may or may not mimic the elaborate protocol designed by the generations of students who have imagined and controlled the Singing Group Council <http://www.yale.edu/sgc/>.[3] The groups can be all-male, all-female, co-ed, for seniors only, or devoted to music associated with particular religions, regions, ethnicities, genres, or cultural styles. The relative standing of the individual groups among their peer organizations is hotly contested and debated and persistently in flux. This is true for both the social and musical identities of the groups on campus. There is both healthy and unhealthy competition between the groups. The competition peaks every year during the first four weeks of the Fall semester when new freshmen singers audition for as many groups as they have been persuaded to try out for.[4] The freshmen auditionees and all the members of the various groups for which they have auditioned then perform a delicate dance of possible pre-commitment in which they sample what it might be like to belong, socially and musically, to the various groups while they are similarly sampled by the same. This four week period is called “rush’,’ a term that certainly references the process of applying to belong to a fraternity or sorority, entities which are rare, although there are always exceptions, on the Yale campus.
Yale Culture Note 3
The idea of a selective collegiate student organization may well have been formulated at Yale when several students formed a debating society called Crotonia in 1738. Other clubs and organizations sprang up almost immediately, including Yale’s now famously covert secret societies as well as many fraternities. Regarding fraternities and sororities at Yale, there are currently three Greek-Letter organizations officially listed as Yale student organizations: Alpha Epsilon Phi Sorority; Alpha Epsilon Pi; and Kappa Kappa Gamma.[5]
The rules for these multi-layered engagements are set and monitored by the Singing Group Council. The Singing Group Council is formed anew on a yearly basis with members chosen (in an unspecified, at least on their website, manner) from among the different groups that fall under the umbrella of the Council. At least two of the members must be from the senior groups – one from the all-female Whim’n Rhythm and another from the all-male Whiffenpoofs. The two other members who make up the Council may also be from the current all-senior groups but should come from different original ensembles.
Yale Culture Note 4
In general (although there are always exceptions), seniors do not sing with the ensembles, at least for the single-sex a cappella groups. After three years, seniors are encouraged to do something else with their time, either by auditioning and being selected for the all-senior, single-sex groups – Whim’n Rhythm and Whiffenpoofs – or by turning their focus to life beyond collegiate a cappella. Even if they are not singing with their old groups anymore, they are still supporting them by showing up at concerts and leaping onto the stage to sing the last piece in a concert, not to mention uttering whistles, catcalls, loud and humorous comments about the relative “hotness” of the singers as they take center stage to sing their solos, and generally good-natured bellows of encouragement for the group throughout the concert. For most of the groups, the last piece in any concert is always a predictable one, a piece designated through tradition (long or short) to incorporate participation by alums, including those seniors who have retired from the groups. The mixed-gender groups often allow their members to continue singing into the senior year, especially if they are in need of a particular vocal part they were not able to replace (female senior, member of mixed-gender group, graduated in ’09).
A quick note on the two all-senior groups, if one auditions and is selected it is possible that one will take a leave of absence from university activities while in the group. Business managers and Pitches or Pitch pipes (the musical directors) for both groups usually take the year off and other group members may do the same. This is particularly true for the members in the Whiffenpoofs ensemble. They regularly tour for much of the academic year, usually performing more than 200 concerts around the world, occasionally appearing on national stages; for instance, the 2010-11 Whiffenpoofs competed on NBC’s Sing Off in December 2010. Although they only made it through two rounds of competition, they were required to be in Los Angeles at the studio for much of August 2010 and they returned to LA for the final, live show in mid-December 2010.[6] This would have imposed mightily on their end-of-semester responsibilities, had they been enrolled. To a great extent, the year off is necessary as Whiffenpoofs become full-time, traveling performers for the year. The “tradition” of taking a year off is not officially sanctioned by the Yale administration, but then again the groups themselves occupy similarly ill-defined space somewhere between an independent, non-profit organization and a Yale-sponsored, student-run group.
According to their website, the activities of the Singing Group Council involve the following responsibilities:
“In the spring preceding fall rush we coordinate with the administration to set the rush calendar and the date for the Woolsey Jam. We revise or amend the rush rules and meet with representatives of all the groups to discuss any changes and finalize the rush calendar. During the fall, we work to assure that the rush process runs as smoothly as possible, from emceeing the Woolsey and Dwight jams to authorizing the start of Tap Night, and being an important resource for group members and rushees in between” (http://www.yale.edu/sgc/aboutus.html, accessed 15 November 2010).
They also work with the Yale Club to organize an annual a cappella dinner in New York City and with the Office of Admissions to mount performances at the annual Bulldog Days Bazaar for pre-freshmen and their families, two activities that are vital for Yale’s communications circuits with alumni and those whom Yale hopes will become alumni. All of the groups perform around Northeast throughout the year and most of them go on national and international tours once or twice during the year. Yale’s two-week spring break and in the early part of the summer are usual tour moments. Some of the locations visited on tour are connected to the Association of Yale Alumni. When they are creating their itineraries for tour, the groups barter their singing for places to stay and rooms in which to perform simultaneously creating or enhancing Yale networks that benefit both the AYA and, through personal contacts, the singers themselves as well as advertising the Yale undergraduate experience around the country and the world. This is certainly a win/win situation for all concerned and the university embraces or at least tolerates (depending on whom one questions) the intensities of the month-long, a cappella rush. A cappella has become so much a part of the Yale undergraduate experience that there are some students who choose Yale over other schools into which they have been accepted because of their desire to be part of the a cappella community or even, hopefully, a specific group. I have heard this from five different students over the three years since beginning the project. Other students inadvertently get caught up in the furious activities of the jams and end up auditioning even though they had not known about the scene before applying for and accepting admission to Yale.
The primary responsibility of the Singing Group Council is to police the events leading up to and through Tap Night. Every year they review and adjust the Rush Rules. Here are the rules as they were published for Rush in 2010. To skip Rush Rules, Click me.
Rush Rules as of September 2010
Beginning of Rush
Rush begins when freshmen arrive on campus.
Group members may not actively advertise or solicit for their group, including but not limited to posters, email, etc., before the beginning of the Freshmen Bazaar.
Groups must also refrain from wearing their group t-shirts before the beginning of the Freshmen Activities Bazaar, with the exception of performances at freshmen events, such as Freshmen Dinners.
No email list may be compiled at the “Bulldog Days Bazaar” or its equivalent.
The SGC will send an email outlining rush and briefly explaining the rush rules to every rushee after auditions. Each a cappella group must supply a list of rushees, including their email addresses and phone numbers (if applicable) to the SGC by noon on Monday, September 6th (the day after auditions). This list will be used by the SGC to contact the rushees, but the information in the master list will not be used or seen by anyone but the SGC chairs.
There will be no impromptu concerts. Written approval from the SGC co-chairs is required for any on-campus singing engagements beyond those normally associated with rush.
Email lists may be compiled at the “Freshperson Bazaar” or its equivalent but only for use in verifying that freshmen (or upperclassmen) who signed up during the bazaar do not want to audition.
Singing at all freshperson functions, including the Fresh Person Conference, FOOT, Harvest, Cultural Connections, the Orientation for International Students, and Freshman Dinners and Picnics will be regulated by the Council. Groups may give a maximum of two performances at freshman picnics and or dinners. There is no rule against two groups singing at the same dinner or same picnic, provided the college Master’s Office permits it. All performances at freshman events will be posted on the SGC website, but only with accompanying proof of confirmation from the event organizers or college Master’s Office.
Auditions
No groups may schedule callbacks after 6:00 on a night when there is a singing dessert.
No alcohol in or around audition space.
In the event that auditions or callbacks occur during a religious holiday, groups must have slots available on the Friday preceding or the Monday following the holiday weekend so that practicing rushees may also participate.
Singing Desserts
All rushees must be extended an invitation. While any member of this singing group may deliver a Singing Group invitation, they must follow the Rush Rule 6a and not enter a rushee’s room.
Singing Desserts are not open to members of other singing groups unless invited. If members of other groups behave inappropriately while at a Dessert or attend without an invitation, they may be asked to leave.
Rush Meals
All rushees must be invited to at least one rush meal.
All rush meals must be held in a Yale dining hall or Residential College common room (includes 12 residential colleges, Commons, Kline, the Kosher Kitchen, the Law School, and SOM. Not Durfee’s! Not Fellows lounges!)
No more than three group members (seated or otherwise) will attend each rush meal per rushee, and you may not substitute seated members at any point during the meal. Passers-by may acknowledge the group members and the rushee but cannot participate in the meal.
Group members that pass by a rush meal in progress and begin a prolonged conversation with the rushee and group members but simply do not sit down will be considered to be taking part in an illegal rush meal.
There will be no large, combined rush meals consisting of multiple rushees and/or more than three group members unless it is the group’s tap night dinner. Rush meals can still be scheduled simultaneously and even in the same dining hall, but the meals must remain at separate tables.
Sitting down at a table with a rushee at any eating establishment or bar constitutes an illegal rush meal.
Respect the privacy of all rush meals.
Groups may not have more than four rush meals with any rushee.
In addition to the four rush meals, groups may invite the rushees of their choosing to a Tap Night Dinner with current group members during dining hall hours on Tap Night.
Alcohol: The singing groups have agreed to comply with the Yale College Policy on Alcoholic Beverages (Undergraduate Regulations, Chapter XII).
All rush events and meetings between singing group members and rushees will be free of alcohol and drugs. This includes but is not limited to post-dessert parties, rush meals, and chance encounters.
Rushee Visits and Communication
Except for freshman counselors, no singing group members (including group alumni) may visit rushees’ rooms except to deliver that group’s singing dessert or callbacks ivitations ONLY (groups may not visit rooms to deliver Tap Night Dinner Invitations). At no time may a singing group member enter the room, however. At no point, however, should these freshmen counselor group members use their access to the rushees to sway their rush decisions.
There shall be no scheduled meetings on or off campus between rushees and singing group members (including group alumni) except rush meals.
Rituals or events that aren’t approved by the SGC are taken particularly seriously and will meet with appropriately severe punishment.
Unauthorized scheduled meetings that take place off-campus will also meet with strict punishment, particularly those involving trespassing (as detailed in Rule 12c).
No group may encourage explicitly or implicitly that any rushee derush a group for any reason.
No group may explicitly or implicitly inform a rushee that s/he will not be tapped on the basis of his or her rushing other singing groups.
Groups must not encourage rushees to act as liason between the group and other rushees (i.e. “all of the good people are going to be in my future group”).
Group members other than rush managers, music directors and business managers may not contact rushees in any way. This includes but is not limited to AIM, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, and text messages.
Parties
Each group may host one party after and on the same night as the singing dessert. Groups may petition the council if they wish to host a different event with their rushees in place of the singing dessert party.
Parties are open to all members of the Yale Community. However, in keeping with the Spirit of Rush, members of other singing groups should only attend if they are invited and their presence is approved by the group or groups hosting.
For the duration of Rush, groups shall not invite, either explicitly or surreptitiously, rushees to any party or other events outside of the singing dessert party.
Walking rushees home from post-dessert parties is prohibited.
Joint parties may occur, but invitees other than rushees need to have both groups’ approval.
Gifts
Gifts are absolutely forbidden. This includes dinner, drinks, term papers, invitations to supplementary parties, etc.
A copy of the group’s album, while a gift, is only given with the express intent of exposing the rushee to the group’s repertoire, and is therefore allowable.
CDs will not be given out at either Bulldog Days Bazaar or its equivalent or the Freshmen Bazaar or its equivalent. They can only be distributed after a rushee has signed up to audition at Dwight Hall Jam.
Tap Notifications (new as of 2010)
NEW: After callback audtions are complete (for Rush 2010, after 5pm on Monday, September 20th) groups may elect, at their discretion, to give a rushee or rushees Tap Notifications. Groups are not required to give Tap Notifications to any of their rushees; however, if a group elects to give a rushee a Tap Notification, then the group is bound to their desicion to tap that rushee on Tap Night.
NEW: Rushees are under no obligation or expectation to respond in any way to the receival of a Tap Notification. Rushees retain the right to say “yes, no, or maybe” to any group that comes to their door on Tap Night, regardless of receipt of a Tap Notification.
NEW: Tap Notifications may only be given on a legal rush meal (occuring after 5pm on Monday, September 20th), or over the phone or in an email from the group’s Rush Managers, Musical Director or Business Manager (see Rule 6f). If a Tap Notification is given on a rush meal or over the phone, an additional email-form Notification must be sent to the Rushee.
NEW: Groups are required to alert the SGC of all Tap Notifications they deliver. This will be done in the form of a list of Tap Notifications, submitted by 5pm on Monday September 20th, and may be supplemented in the intervening days prior to Tap Night.
The names of all male rushees receiving Tap Notifications (from either men’s or mixed groups) will be submitted to a pre-determined SGC Co-Chair. The designated Co-Chair for Rush 2010 is Steph Strauss (stephanie.strauss@yale.edu).
The names of all female rushees receiving Tap Notifications (from either women’s or mixed groups) will be submitted to a pre-determined SGC Co-Chair. The designated Co-Chair for Rush 2010 is Sam Wood (samuel.wood@yale.edu).
Tap Night
New as of 2010: No singing group may involve a rushee/or rushees in ceremonial pre-tapping events or conversations beyond the scope of legal rush meals and Section 6. This includes but is not limited to parties other than the one sanctioned by the SGC, night-time walks, or formal ceremonies. In addition, singing groups may not give out any Tap Notifications prior to 5pm on Monday, September 20th or after 9pm on Tap Night, as stipulated in 10c.
Tap begins at 10:00 p.m. and ends at 12:30 a.m.
No singing group member may have contact with a rushee after 9:00 p.m. on tap night, unless he or she is notifying the rushee that he or she will not be tapped. A singing group member may not be in any tappee’s room before 10:00 p.m.
After a group has finished tapping the rushee, all members of the group (including group alumni) must exit the entryway regardless of the rushee’s response. No member may be left behind in the rushee’s room or entryway.
All groups must call their definite non-tappees (those who are not on any of a group’s tap lists) before 9:00 p.m.; all rushees must have been contacted by 12:30 am.
Sophomores, juniors, and seniors may be tapped at anytime after auditioning. All other rules apply until they are tapped. After they are tapped, they may not act as a liason between the group and rushees.
Rush is a finite process. No group may actively pursue an undecided Tappee after 12:30 AM. All post-tap issues involving rushees shall be governed by the Singing Group Council.
Post-Tap
Undecided tappees must commit by midnight on Sunday following tap.
Indirect Violations: Spirit of Rush
Certain egregious actions which fall outside of the specific parameters outlined in the aforementioned rules may still warrant disciplinary action by the Singing Group Council.
Spirit of Rush infractions include, but are not limited to: showing up at another group’s singing dessert party without an invitation or dressed in one’s own group’s paraphernalia, loitering around another group’s table at sign-up jam, waiting around on old campus or outside a singing dessert to “walk freshmen where they need to go,” and generally pressuring a rushee to drop another group’s rush or not attend their dessert/party or to give your own group an indication of his or her preference.
No group member may have extended contact with a rushee outside of the scheduled Rush events. This includes but is not limited to long conversations, games/sports, cookouts, impromptu concerts, and homework parties. The term “extended contact” is subject to the discretion of the Singing Group Council and will be imposed within reason, after discussing with all parties involved.
Penalties
An infraction of Rush Rules will, upon first offense, incur a warning, and upon any subsequent offense will be penalized at the discretion of the Co-Chairs.
Freshmen and singing group members are encouraged to report any infractions to the SGC co-chairs in the form of a detailed e-mail that can be corroborated by at least one other witness. SGC co-chairs will then rule on the alleged infraction and impose an appropriate penalty.
Revised as of 2009: Potential penalties (ultimately, the co-chairs and/or The Dean of Student Affairs will decide the penalty that suits the situation):
1st offense: a two minute wait at the gate on Tap Night
2nd offense: elimination of tap night dinner in current rush
3rd offense: removal from Woolsey set in the next rush
4th offense: removal from both the Woolsey and Dwight sets in the next rush. Groups may still have a table at Dwight for signups
5th offense: inability to participate in rush in the following year
Special offense for violating Rule 5 (alcohol) or extreme permutations of Rule 6b (unauthorized rituals or off-campus meetings): a two minute wait at the gate on Tap Night AND removal from Woolsey set in the next rush
Any offenses that transpire after a penalty would normally go into effect will be imposed on the group the following year, or the co-chairs will impose an alternate penalty.
If a group disagrees with the punishment imposed, the group may submit a written argument by email to the co-chairs within a day of being notified of the punishment. The co-chairs will then send it out to the full SGC panlist, accompanied by an explanation of the reasoning behind the punishment. The SGC will then collect a response from each group as to the validity of the punishment. If fewer than two-thirds of the underclassmen groups agree with the punishment, then at least one co-chair and at least one member of the protesting group will meet with the Dean of Student Affairs to discuss. The punishment will stand until and unless the Dean of Student Affairs sides with the protesting group <http://www.yale.edu/sgc/rules.html>(accessed September 2010).
Reviewing the rules as they have developed, it is possible to see the Singing Group Council responding to various actions by one or another group that other groups have felt violated the ‘spirit of rush.’ For instance, in the section on Rushee Visits and Communications, “There shall be no scheduled meetings on or off campus between rushees and singing group members (including group alumni) except rush meals. Rituals or events that aren’t approved by the SGC are taken particularly seriously and will meet with appropriately severe punishment.” Reading this, one can easily imagine the kind of persuasive tactics that had been taken to convince one or another rushee to join with group A rather than group B. There are even (possibly apocryphal) stories of various alumni offering particularly favored rushees large checks or weekends in New York in exchange for the singer to de-rush other groups and commit to the group doing the bribing (Senior from the class of 2010). Invariably, in this kind of organization, the rules lag behind the actions that generate the need for the rules. Groups that are caught breaching a current rule or engaging in behavior that is generally considered to be unfair, according to the Singing Group Council – and that may be likely to generate the need for a new rule in the succeeding rush period – are fined. The payment is not made in money, however, but with something even more precious to these groups, time. Groups that are caught breaking the rules are delayed in their running start on Tap Night, either in the current year or in the following year. A fine of one or two minutes – time spent waiting, scuffing the dust, at the High Street Gate instead of racing across the Old Campus to the room of the first person on their tap list – is tantamount to condemning the group to losing one or even two of its most preferred auditionees to other groups who are not delayed and who arrive first. A time delay is actually a heavy punishment. But of course “everything can be maneuvered around and negotiated” (Junior male singer, October 2007).
Tap Night
The month-long courtship between freshmen singers and a cappella groups culminates in Tap Night. Tap Night is usually on the Wednesday or Thursday in the third week of September.[7] Tap night officially begins around 10:00pm. But from about 8:30pm on the evening of Tap Night, the High Street Gate into the Old Campus – where most the freshmen traditionally have their rooms – is locked. Members of the a cappella groups are forbidden from having any contact at all with freshmen auditionees during the hour before the beginning of Tap Night. By this time, the members of the a cappella groups have been in frenzied consultation with one another for the whole day. Over the course of the last several days, each group will have finalized a ‘tap list’ with their choices in ‘tap order.’ This ordering is not simply a list of first to last preference. Instead, it is a careful and complicated calculation involving the assessment of many people’s intuitions and intimations based on a smattering of surety. One student singer described some of the necessities to be considered in creating the tap list:
If you know that a particular person is certain to say yes when you tap him, then you don’t need to put him first on the list, even if you really, really want that person to join the group. You need to get to the people whose intentions you are unsure about but whom you really want first, so that they know you really want them and, hopefully, they will want to join your group. Some singers may be tapped by three or four groups over the course of tap night, so you have think carefully about how and when to approach everyone on your tap list in the effort to have a “perfect tap,” that is, getting all the singers you want to actually commit to your group (Junior, 2009)
The tap strategies are constructed in secret and as 10:00pm on Tap Night nears, members of the a cappella groups assume their positions. Often a few members of each group are hunkered down in what some groups call “the war room,” a place where the leaders of each ensemble’s tap night plans gather in order to communicate with everyone in the field and to direct the operations. They must be able to respond to any news of the tapping by other groups – or indecision on the part – of any of the singers on their group’s tap list and rapidly re-order the list whenever necessary over the course of the evening to ensure a collection of singers that will allow the group to continue to develop while maintaining its social and musical status on campus. One rush manager (Sophomore, 2007) described having about four or five alternative lists already prepared in an effort to accommodate all the possible decisions the singers they planned to tap might make.
The rest of each a cappella group gathers outside the High Street Gate. Many of them have their bodies slicked down in colorful grease paint “to be more aerodynamic,” suggested one person with the skin on his legs glistening a pale blue in the glow of the streetlights. Others, with their eyes, cheeks, and arms boldly adorned with footballers’ markings and sometimes with the logo of their groups, explained that they paint themselves up to: “cut down on glare” (at night??); “look really fierce;” “to show group solidarity and charge everyone up;” “to make sure the freshmen know which group is tapping them.”[8] Tension mounts and the crush increases, with the addition of people drawn to the drama of the evening and onlookers who had been merely passing by, as 10:00pm inches closer. At the appointed hour, a representative of Yale College, often the Dean of Students, drops a broom, the signal to begin Tap Night, and the event begins. As the gate is thrown open, the crowd surges through, hot on the heels of the designated runners. Each group is allowed one official designated runner. This person must be fast and strong, able to beat out the runners of other groups, especially if other groups are competing for the same freshmen singers. One Senior in 2009 told me that the runner’s position was such an important one for Tap Night that when a group was deciding between two potential taps and could not differentiate based on musicality or sociability, they might select the singer who looked to be more fit or who had identified him or herself as enjoying running.
Runners are important for Tap Night because of the rules and rituals for tapping. The first group to have a representative at the room of a particular tap prospect earns to right to ask that person to join their group before any of the other groups who arrive afterwards. If two or more groups are competing for the same singer, the first group to ask may have a better chance at persuading the tapped singer to join. At least, this advantage is present in theory. The realities of pre-tapping and the possibilities for muttered intimations of pre-commitment may make this theory obsolete. The runner alone cannot invite a freshman singer to join, however. The whole group must be present and the group’s tap song must be performed. This generates interesting scenes at the doorways to the stairwells leading to various freshmen rooms. The runners arrive panting and with mono-directional intent, often racing against another runner right up to the door. The runner who claims first arrival then waits with anxious anticipation for the slower members of his or her group. When they arrive, sometimes later than the members of other groups competing for the same singers depending on their relative fitness, a certain amount of generally good-natured pushing and shoving to make way for the group of the first runner to access the entry way occurs. Once the full group is assembled, they clamber up the stairs, sometimes 6 flights, to the suite doorway of the desired tappee who awaits their arrival usually accompanied by his or her own suitemates. The tappers sing the group’s tap song, mugging their love and, occasionally on bended knee and with other forms of over-the-top supplication, offer the tappee a group t-shirt. Most groups also offer the tappee a first drink from a large two-handled, metal “cup.” If the tappee decides to join the group, s/he will accept the shirt and then will drink from the cup. The group of tappers then rushes off to the room of the next person on their tap list in order to repeat the same ritual. Occasionally, the tappee is swept up in the swirl as the group rushes on to tap other singers, not least if the tappee wants to avoid saying no to the singing overtures from other groups also seeking her/his commitment. The tappees are not officially allowed to join in when the members of their new group croon the tap song to the subsequent tappees. One junior (2009) pointed out that the taps wouldn’t know the song. And, in addition it might be insulting to for others to know that they were not tapped first which might then reduce their desire to join the group.
Yale Culture Note 5
The large cups come to tap night from the “cup tradition” at Mory’s Temple Bar – the private, formerly men-only-now-open-to-all New Haven club in which the Whiffenpoofs, originally, and now all the a cappella groups gather to sing, particularly on Mondays but also on other days. The club is memorialized in The Whiffenpoof Song (written by Guy H. Skull with text by Meade Minnigerode based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Gentleman Rankers)[9] that became and continues to be the iconic farewell, concert-ending song for the Whiffenpoofs in the first decade of the twentieth century. The song was also performed and recorded by Rudy Vallee (1927) and Bing Crosby (1947) and many others.
The cup tradition at Mory’s is a complicated process in which drinkers pass a series of cups around from one to the next. The drinks are mixes with various bases – soda water, beer, etc. – with myriad flavors, alcoholic and non-alcoholic mixes, and, importantly, many different vibrant colors. The person to finish the last draught from one cup must clean the cup out using only his mouth, tongue, and finally, hair. During the cleansing process, the collected groups sing the Mory’s song. The cup is then flipped over on a napkin of either cloth or paper, tapped firmly on the top by three friends, after which the cleanliness of the cup is assessed. In the past, if there were drops on the napkin then the cleaner would be responsible for paying for the “cup.” If it were dry, then the person to the right of the drinker would be forced to pay for not finishing the cup off himself and leaving it to the next in line. It is now more likely that the group, or toasting party, will split the costs of the cups.[10]
Tap Night Etiquette
It is possible for tappees to decline an invitation or to decline to decide at the moment of the invitation to join a particular group. It is considered bad form, however, to know in advance that you are not interested in joining a particular group and not alert them to your pre-Tap Night decision and then to de-rush. This kind of “selfish” (Sophomore male singer, 2009) act is a huge disadvantage for the group because it delays the tap process for the group since the group wastes time in pausing to invite a tappee who already has decided not to join. Certain steps can be taken to avoid this kind of scene. Groups are allowed/encouraged to ‘kill call’ all singers whom they do not plan to tap within a certain period of time before Tap Night. The freshmen singers can elect to receive this call or not and so they control to some degree how many ‘kill calls’ a group can make. The ‘kill call’ prevents freshmen singers from saying no to one group hoping that another, without plans for tapping him or her, will arrive. While the kill call can speedup the pain of rejection and make it sharper, it also alleviates the slow death through waiting for a freshman singer. A group inevitably has some singers on their list whom they would happily tap, if others ahead of them on the tap list decline to join. A group would be working against its better interests if it was to give kill calls to singers before the tap about whom they could not make a yes or no decision until they are in the middle of the tapping process. Likewise, there are singers who cannot afford to de-rush their second and third choice groups until they are certain that they will be tapped by their first choice group. These exciting uncertainties mean both ecstasy and disappointment will very likely settle on different singers and groups during each Tap Night. If a freshmen singer is seriously considering all groups which might tap him or her, s/he will hedge the bets and not de-rush any of the groups for which they auditioned. In this scenario, the freshman singer may already have been tapped and said yes to a group when another arrives to sing an invitation. When a freshman singer is in a position where s/he must say “no thank you” to a particular entreaty, it is a sad and disappointed, but still spiritedly hopeful group that tumbles down the stairs heading off to the next on the tap list. “Awkward,” was how one freshman (2010) tappee, who had declined several groups’ offers, described the experience of listening to the tap song of an eager group and then having to decline. If one group is behind another anxiously awaiting their chance to invite the recruit, they may actually telephone to the singer urging him or her to wait until they get there to decide which group to join. Some singers like to keep everyone waiting and so neither de-rush any groups nor decide to join when the various groups comes to offer a position. This kind of behavior is generally disparaged but it happens every so often. Indecisive tappees have until the Sunday after Tap Night to decide. Singers who take that kind of time to decide are confusing to most who are involved.
“How can they not be able to decide?” (an indignant Junior female singer, 2009).
But in the aftermath, people do like to tell stories about those who decline to decide, stringing everyone along for several days, especially if their own group has not been involved in the decision.
Once the tapping process has been completed, the groups and their new taps retire to party and celebrate the group in its new incarnation. Many groups put up pictures and messages of congratulation and introduction to the year’s taps on their facebook pages as soon as the tap is complete. Nearly all of the groups venture off on a singing retreat with their new recruits the following weekend. These weekends of intensive music and social learning and bonding are important rites of passage for the new recruits as well as for the reformation of the groups as performing entities.
“It was as if I suddenly had a whole family on campus” (Freshman female, 2008).
“I went from missing my own family to having a huge collection of friends. Different from family but I felt like I coul rely on them like family” (Junior male, 2008).
“It’s like an instant family” (Sophomore male, 2009).
The retreat is essential for training the new recruits into their roll as group members. The first official concert for most of the groups in their new configuration is on Parent’s weekend in mid-October, leaving just a few weeks for the new singers to become seasoned members, and for the new group to rise, Phoenix-like, to assume its new, yet old identity.[11]
Ethnographic Study of Yale’s A Cappella Scene:
A Graduate Course on Affinity Groups, Communities of Practice, and Fieldwork
One of the problems that confronts ethnomusicologists in the academy is finding ways for one’s students to gain experience in the field while they are still students, before they take on the responsibilities of designing and enacting a project on their own. Asking students to attend multiple concerts and other performance events, learning the differences between writing reports, reviews, ethnographic description, and analysis is one good way to teach a few of the basic skills they might need. But to design and carryout an ethnographic project involving interviews both in the field and out, participant observation, and group and independent assessment and analysis is a complete and complex experience that is not always available to ethnomusicology students. Kay Shelemay has led the way in creating fieldwork opportunities for her students. Her urban ethnomusicology project with the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn (active fieldwork period, 1985-1988) while Shelemay was teaching at New York University and her Boston Early Music Scene project (active fieldwork period, 1996-1997) when Shelemay was at Harvard brought more than thirty students into active fieldwork, generated at least one dissertation,[12] and provided formative experiences for at least fifteen professional ethnomusicologists currently working in universities around the world.[13] Approaching the problem from another angle, Carol Muller and Tim Rommen ethnomusicologists at the University of Pennsylvania have an on-going project called West Philadelphia Music http://www.sas.upenn.edu/music/westphillymusic/ in which undergraduate and graduate music and anthropology students, over several generations, have taken courses on and done research in the West Philadelphia communities engaging with, teaching, learning, and performing with community members. Muller and Rommen call their project an academically based community service. It is a kind of applied ethnomusicological project that brings together students, university and community building bridges between the three.
In developing the Singing Community project, I designed a graduate seminar around the fieldwork process as I imagined that it might happen. The course was entitled “Singing Community: A Cappella at Yale and the Practice of Music Ethnography.” The intellectual trajectory of the course was based on choral studies (Ahlquist 2006); studies of voice, body, and style (Barthes 1977; Bennet 1999; Gilroy 1991; Gordon 2006; Olwege 2004; Tobias and Leader 1999 among others); affinity and community studies (Anderson 1983; Choi 2006; Cohen 1985; Connell and Gibson 2003; Erlmann 1999; Hobsbawm 1983; Slobin 1993), and essays that describe, analyze, and critique the ethnographic process both in one’s own community and outside of it (Barz and Cooley 1997; Chou 2002; Clifford 1983; Koskoff 1993; Lassiter 2005; Petersen 2005). Affinity studies focus on groups of people who coalesce and bond around common interests rather than familial, ethnic or racial connections. Affinity describes precisely the ties that bind the Yale a cappella groups together. Even in the groups devoted to the music of a particular ethnic, racial or religious group, the members of the ensemble need not embody the race, ethnicity or religion of the focus music. Hence, the group Shades has a primary focus on music of African-American derivation, but one need not be African American to perform with the ensemble. Likewise, Magevet performs music of the Jewish diaspora and Living Waters performs Christian music but each asks only that the members be interested in those musics, not that they be practitioners of the focus religion. These groups form communities of practice, one of the terms used by people working in affinity studies. Communities of practice “are relations of people who have in common a shared competence and mutual interest in a given practice” (Choi 2006, 143). The members of the individual groups know one another through shared ways of being, short but intense histories of experience, and musical bonding. In some senses these musician friends are joined more closely than many communities of practice. Extending this idea, all the members of all the Yale a cappella groups form a loosely based community of practice, singers of a cappella. Comparisons can be made with the relationships between members on specific sports teams and those between collegiate athletes on a campus in general. The interesting thing about affinity groups and communities of practice is that one can easily belong to several communities of practice at the same time. People can effortlessly shift between an a cappella community and a pre-med community. Although my data comes from a collegiate setting, the same is true for groups forming in other contexts. One of my working hypotheses is that affinity groupings are as powerful, in terms of creating identity, as race and ethnicity, perhaps more so because one can actually choose to belong rather than having one’s identity birth-determined.[14] The long-term plan for the Singing Community project is to explore the intersectionality of community and individual identity formation as they are developed through the act of singing together.
Next Steps and Overview of Student Articles Included Here
Although I have not yet had the opportunity to teach the Singing Community seminar again, the project continues in a subdued way. Just after our seminar finished, we were interviewed by John Walters of NBCSports.com. He was writing an article comparing the world of college a cappella with that college sports. Our comments were featured in the second half of the article and can be found at: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/23617259/ns/sports-other_sports/. Walker was particularly keen to explore the similarities between the ways in which group formation occurs both singing groups and sports teams. In addition, preliminary connections with the Association of Yale Alumni have been made and are crucial to the development of the project as many of the a cappella ensembles have their own alumni organizations, loosely connected to the AYA, not to mention the fact that all the groups regularly perform for alumni events around the world. I was contacted and consulted by the group responsible for the refurbishment and refinancing of Mory’s (now reopened and flourishing). I was also asked to participate in the conference symposium that took place during the centenary celebration of the Whiffenpoofs that took place in October of 2009 on 2 October http://www.whiffalumni.com/whiffenpoof_centennial. Several of the student singers whom I interviewed in the course of the project ended up taking other classes with me and they have written papers on various aspects of the Yale a cappella world.
Although the fieldwork for this project has communal aspects, all of the students involved in the class have pursued their own avenues of investigation, developing topics that suited their own interests and skills. Some of the students elected to develop their independent research into articles for publication in this issue. Valerie Rogotzke has written a wide-ranging history of collegiate a cappella singing and its relationship, at Yale at least, to the development of class-cohort identity formation and other community and society traditions at Yale. Esther Morgan-Ellis explores, with attention to detail, one aspect of how students decide to join particular ensembles and how particular ensembles choose their taps. Using the data from several specially designed surveys, she examines the relationship between musical and social preferences, in particular how people value and rank the importance of musicality and sociability when they make their choices as to which groups to rush and join and, from the groups’ perspectives, which singers to invite. She presents a comparison with an instrumental group on the Yale campus that also engages in a rush process. Danielle Ward-Griffin explores aspects of gender and the history of women in the a cappella community and at Yale in general. Conducting independent, additional fieldwork and interviews with current and past members of New Blue – the first women’s ensemble at Old Blue (as Yale is known) – instituted in 1969, Ward-Griffin explores the tensions and pleasures of being women singers at Yale in the past and into the present. She also explores the ways in which the New Blue’s repertoire has developed from imitation of male groups sound and voicings to innovation of their own musical styles. [15]
Our four essays merely brush the surface of the research projects that might be engaged in order to fully describe and understand the Yale a cappella community. Specific studies of the history and changing nature of each of the groups, including the all-senior Whiffenpoofs and Whim n’ Rhythm should be produced; the persistently changing relationship between the a cappella groups and various elements of the Yale administration should be explored; a comparative analysis examining the similarities and differences between belonging to an a cappella group and belonging to other affinity-based organizations at Yale, such as sports teams, official university performing ensembles, clubs, theatre organizations etc. should be undertaken; student experiences, both positive and negative should be recorded; all of these opinion-based enquiries should include students currently participating in the Yale a cappella world as well as alumni. In short, these four articles represent a project just begun rather than one finished off.
Sarah Weiss, Yale University
Bibliography
Ahlquist, Karen (ed.). 2006 Chorus and Community. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Anderson, Benedict .1983 Introduction. Imagined Communities. London/New York: Verso Press, 1-7.
Barz, Gregory and Timothy Cooley (eds). 1997 Shadows in the Field. New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. New York and Oxford/ Oxford University Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1977 The Grain of the Voice. Image Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 179-89.
Bennett, Andy. 1999 Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship Between Youth, Style and Musical Taste. Sociology 33/3: 599-617.
___________. 2004 Consolidating the Music Scenes Perspective. Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research On Culture, the Media and the Arts 32/3-4: 223-45.
Carter, Shannon. nd. What is a Community of Practice? http://faculty.tamu-commerce.edu/scarter/CofP.htm (accessed 20 December 2010)
Choi, Mina. 2006. Communities of Practice: An Alternative Learning Model for Knowledge Creation. British Journal of Educational Technology. 37/1: 143-46.
Chou, Chiener. 2002 Experience and Fieldwork: A Native Researcher’s View. Ethnomusicology 46/3: 456-86.
Clifford, James. 1983 On Ethnographic Authority. Representations 2: 118-46.
Cohen, Anthony. 1985 Symbolic Construction of Community New York: Tavistock Publications. Ebray book: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/yale/Doc?id=5003539
Connell, John and Chris Gibson. 2003 Soundtracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. London and New York” Routledge, chaps. 3, 6, and browse through 10.
Erlmann, Veit. 1999 Communities of Style. Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 246-67.
Gilroy, Paul. 1991 Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity and the Challenge of a “Changing” Same. Black Music Research Journal 11/2: 111-36.
Gordon, Bonnie. 2006 The Courtesan’s Singing Body as Cultural Capital in Seventeenth-Century Italy. The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives edited by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 182-98.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983 Introduction – Inventing Tradition. The Invention of Tradition edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-14.
Koskoff, Ellen 1993. Miriam Sings Her Song: The Self and Other in Anthropological Discourse. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Discourse edited by Ruth Solie. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 149-63.
Lassiter, Luke. 2005 Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology. Current Anthropology 46/1: 83-107. Find it at this URL:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/journal/issues/v46n1/051001/051001.html
Olwege, Grant. 2004 The Class and Colour of Tone: An Essay on the Social History of Vocal Timbre. Ethnomusicology Forum 13?2: 203-26.
Petersen, Glenn. 2005 Important to Whom? On Ethnographic Usefulness, Competence and Relevance. Anthropological Forum 15/3: 307-13.
Shelemay, Kay K. 2011 Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Music. Journal of the American Musicological Society 64/2-349-390.
Shelemay, Kay K. 2001 Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds. Ethnomusicology 45/1: 1-29.
Slobin, Mark. 1993 Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Tobias, Shelia and Shelah Leader. 1999 Vox Populi to Music. Journal of American Culture 22/4: 91-101.
[1] I have been conducting formal and informal interviews with undergraduates about a cappella at Yale since the beginning of the project in 2007. I have decided never to name any students, even if they agreed to allow me to use their names. Students are referred to by their year status at the time and the year in which they made the comment. The student I am quoting here was a male senior at the time and graduated in 2009.
[2] Harkness Hall – completed in 1927 – is in the collegiate gothic style that is the hallmark of much of the architecture from the early twentieth-century expansions on the Yale campus.
[3] There are also a cappella groups run by students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Divinity School, the Law School and occasionally the Medical School: Academia Nuts – Women, GSAS; Citations – Co-ed, GSAS; Sacramental Winers – Women, Div School; Bible Belters – Men, Div School; Habeas Chorus – Co-ed, Law School.
[4] It is possible to audition for the group as a sophomore but one is much less likely to be successful. There are tales of juniors who have switched groups, but even the senior (graduated 2010) who told me about this was uncertain if it had really happened. See Rogotzke in this issue for a brief discussion of the history of the socializing of class cohorts at Yale.
[5] http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/01_03/groups.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crotonia (both accessed 23 December 2010)
[6] See Rogotzke here for a recounting of other national appearances by the Whiffenpoofs over the years as well as a brief history and discussion of the Whiffenpoofs and their claim to be the first collegiate a cappella group.
[7] The actually date in any given year is kept secret from the rest of the Yale community. This secrecy is necessary, apparently, because one year one of the humorist societies invited all the freshman out to dinner, away from campus and kept them entertained there until after the beginning of Tap Night. Hence, when the singing groups arrived at the doors of the suites of the freshmen auditionees whom they were planning to invite to join their groups, none of them was to be found on the old campus where the freshmen traditionally live. This story may very well be apocryphal but three students have recounted it to me as a rationale for the secrecy surrounding the date of Tap Night. Another student told me it was just more fun to have the date be secret. He said that the secrecy and private little rituals had made the whole thing much more enjoyable for him when he was a freshman (Junior 2007)
[8] These were a few of the reasons students gave when I queried their various uses of body paint in the Tap Night preparations (September 2007).
[9] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentleman_ranker#Rudyard_Kipling (accessed 26 December 2010) for brief history of the Gentleman Ranker poem and the history of its musical settings.
[10] This information is compiled from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mory%27s#Cups and from conversation with several singers who graduated in 2010.
[11] The reasons and logic for the development of this elaborate tap ritual can be directly connected to the tapping processes of the secret student societies as they have developed at Yale over the centuries. I will be exploring these connections in ethnographic and historical detail more fully in further stages of this a cappella project. See the following site for a brief history and just some of the plethora of lore about Yale’s secret societies: http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2004_09/old_yale.html (accessed 27 December 2010)
[12] Mark Kligman’s Maqam and Liturgy: Ritual, Music and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn (2009, Wayne State University) comes from his dissertation based on fieldwork while collaborating with Shelemay continuing on after she had finished.
[13] See Kay Shelemay’s “Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds” in Ethnomusicology (2001) 45/1: 1-29 and Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) for descriptions of her projects and the students who were involved in them.
[14] Subsequent to the seminar in 2007, Kay Shelemay published an article (2011) exploring the nature of musical affinity groups among members of an African diaspora. Her work confirms some of the ideas and hypotheses we explore here.
[15] There is good evidence that New Blue has a competitor for the position of first female ensemble in the Yale Women’s Slavic Chorus, also instituted in 1969. See http://yaleslavicchorus.com/about/ (accessed 3 January 2011) and http://newblue.art.officelive.com/history.aspx (accessed 3 January 2011). Both groups have legitimate claim to the position and no one has yet done the research to find out which group actually did begin before the other. In some ways, it is nice not to know. It is clear they both began in 1969 and that both were among the first women’s organizations to be formed at Yale. That first two women’s organizations at Yale were a cappella groups suggests something about the importance of group singing at Yale through the twentieth century. The competition between men’s and women’s groups and the persistent perceived/imagined lower ranking of all-women groups in terms of musical and performance capability is an important issue that we are currently investigating.
Singing Community 