Barbershop quartet to perform at St. Mary's

On Feb. 15, the acapella quartet Heartfelt, consisting of members of the Westchester Harmony chorus, will perform at St. Mary's Church in Cold Spring. Beacon resident Scott Kruse is substituting to sing baritone, which insiders call the "junk notes" because they sound almost unmusical when performed solo.

The tones are "integral to the overall chord, but hearing them alone is rough sledding," says Bill Kruse, Heartfelt's lead singer and Scott's father.

Traditional barbershop repertoire consists of popular songs from more than a century ago, like "Sweet Adeline," "Hello! Ma Baby" and "By the Light of the Silvery Moon." Heartfelt will deliver some comedy, lead sing-a-longs and perform numbers appropriate for Valentine's Day.

The spelling of "Ma Baby" hints at the genre's roots in minstrelsy, where white performers corked up their faces and caricatured Black people, a portrayal perpetuated by Hollywood through the 1950s. Early barbershoppers appropriated the style from Black singers who secularized four-part gospel harmony.

Louis Armstrong sang in a New Orleans quartet and ragtime composer Scott Joplin's 1910 opera Treemonisha includes a barbershop number, "We Will Rest a While."

The groups that recorded in the late 1890s and early 1900s, like the Edison and the Haydn quartets, "got to do so because they were white," says Brian Lynch of the Nashville-based Barbershop Harmony Society. "The Black groups couldn't get that kind of exposure."

Then came the porkpie hats, red vests, maybe a mustache and always the cornpone humor. The style is characterized by a tenor pitched above the melody (or lead). The bass nails down the low end and the baritone fills in the mid-range notes. Chords are held for emphasis, notes are bent, repeated and inverted to create sounds that can be stirring.

In 1938, toward the end of the Great Depression, a group of singers in Tulsa formed the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, known by the awkward acronym SPEBSQUA, which lampooned federal New Deal agencies. After a stint in Wisconsin, the organization moved to Nashville in 2007 and became the Barbershop Harmony Society a year later.

"There's a lot of experimentation going on" in the genre, says Lynch, but at competitions, the society enforces rules regarding the number of seventh notes that must be sung. Known as the "blue note," the seventh emphasizes a half-step drop of pitch from the keynote and is the genre's signature sound.

The Westchester group dates to 1953. Like many other ensembles, it has performed concerts dedicated to the Beatles, Broadway, the music of the 1960s and composers associated with the Great American Songbook.

For a traditional style of music, things are in flux. Known as the Westchester Chordsmen for many years, Westchester Harmony rebranded last year and began accepting women as members following the Barbershop Harmony Society's lead in 2018, Lynch says. Today about 20 percent of the 650 choruses in North America include women (along with seven of Westchester Harmony's 55 singers).

Beyond tight harmonies and corny humor, barbershop choruses are known for constant and consistent recruiting. "We're always looking for voices," says Bill Kruse. "The beauty of being among a lot of singers is that you can easily blend in, but if you're in a quartet and someone hits a wrong bass note, it's easy to identify the culprit. The beauty of the larger group is that anyone can sing this style of music, and it's fun."

St. Mary's Church is located at 1 Chestnut St. in Cold Spring. The free concert, which is part of the ongoing Music at St. Mary's series, begins at 2 p.m.