While cars meandered by and families strolled down Christmas Card Lane, club president Crystal Chen (12) blew a familiar note on her pitch pipe and counted off the members of the Fellowship of the Sing, Dec. 14. With the first chord of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” they began their set, the confidence in their voices growing as a crowd gathered.
“[We were] hoping [the opening song] would sound good, have good balance, and that people would be receptive to it,” Chen said. “[When we started singing], it felt really nice that people were appreciating our caroling.”
The club performed at multiple different locations in the neighborhood throughout the night, a culmination of the intricate work during the prior months.
“I’m really proud of everyone that was there, and it was rewarding to hear them all show the practice they put into the pieces,” Chen said.
Established in 2022, the Fellowship of the Sing, also known as the Acapella Club, meets weekly to learn songs ranging from barbershop tags to these Christmas carols. They accept new members year-round with the goal of reuniting the school’s singing community and keeping members like vice president Nicole Pawlicki (11) connected with their lost choir elective.
“The club has helped me to meet other people who have the same interests as I do,” Pawlicki said. “Now that the choir program is gone at Westview, there’s not really a place for me to find other people to sing with at school, so being in the club has just helped me meet people who love to sing.”
Although they are rooted in Westview Choir, Chen said they have grown to keep acapella center-stage.
“What I want to achieve through Acapella [Club] is [to] promote the style of singing,” Chen said. “I know acappella isn’t really a secret form of singing, but it’s definitely one that I feel is sort of overlooked sometimes.”
As opposed to traditional choirs, acapella choirs build harmonies using only their voices.
“With acapella, you don’t have [instruments to rely on], so it kind of tests your musical knowledge and tests your ability to find your notes, especially [when] keeping tempo,” Chen said. “Without [professional accompanists], you have to rely on yourself and the entire group.”
After restructuring harmonies to accommodate this year’s new members and compensate for the loss of last year’s seniors, Chen said the club has developed a novel sound.
“[Having new singers] adds more color to the sound,” Chen said. “We have some people who have new, lower voices or people who changed to lower voices, and that’s also really important [because] you want the lower voices to support everything and add more fullness to the entire sound.”
To perfect a song, secretary Maritza Ruiz-Soto (12) said members’ unique voices must weave seamlessly together; to achieve this, each part in a piece must be fine-tuned.
“We assign voice parts, at least one person per part, and then we go over the notes for each of our parts,” Ruiz-Soto said. “[Chen] brings out her phone and she tunes every single group, and then we work on the hardest bits from there.”
Each winter, the club uses this process to learn a set of roughly seven songs for their caroling events. Chen said that this selection comes more naturally to the singers than other performances with more technical and professional sets.
“The songs that we’re doing are more familiar for a lot of people because everyone has heard Christmas carols, so they know vaguely what it’s supposed to sound like,” Chen said. “Even if you’re singing harmony, you know how your harmony plays into the melody.”
These familiar songs include holiday classics like “Joy to the World,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Auld Lang Syne,” and Westview Choir’s previously traditional “Carol of the Bells.”
Ruiz-Soto said that for many members, their caroling is not only a way to carry on Westview Choir’s legacy, but also to help spread the holiday spirit.
“[Caroling] is a grand old Christmas tradition that is not really done in this day and age, and when we bring back the Christmas carols, we just want to bring [the Christmas spirit] back with us,” Ruiz-Soto said.
Along with bringing the group closer, Pawlicki said that seeing the joy of passersby was one of the singers’ most rewarding experiences.
“It’s a lot of fun when you go out and you can see people smiling, or when they clap for you and they’re happy,” she said. “That’s the best part.”
