Claremont Colleges Midnight Echo

Midnight Echo is a top-notch mixed group out of The Claremont Colleges. Business Manager Peter Tu took the time to answer questions from The A Cappella Blog.

The A Cappella Blog (ACB): Where did the group name Midnight Echo come from?

Peter Tu (PT): So I went back and asked a lot of members from before and I guess I found a lot of different conflicting stories as to how it came about. I’m tempted to just guess at what happened though: turns out we’re all college students and so we’re extremely busy all the time, and we do almost all our work at night. Our rehearsal times are also generally really close to midnight, as well as our arch concerts and other events. Since the space just outside the room we rehearse inl is a really echo-y hallway, we felt that it was both interesting and appropriate that our group would be called Midnight Echo.

ACB: What is the audition process like for Midnight Echo?

PT: Here at the Claremont Colleges, all the groups have a unified audition schedule, so we all have the same audition day. The funny thing is, the club fair that lets students about clubs and on-campus groups actually happens after the auditions, so we can’t pass out flyers then. We then rely on emailing student email lists and Facebook announcements to get news out.

For the actual audition process we do some pretty standard things--have the auditionees do some warm-ups, figure out their range, and also have them do a short sight-reading exercise. After that, we see how well they can do a vocal swell, and see how well they can repeat for us a sequence of notes played on the piano with increasing difficulty. Finally, they sing a roughly 40 second solo that they’ve prepared to show us what they can do.

For those auditionees that pass this first round, we call them back to figure out some other things. We have them learn two pieces of our repertoire from the previous semester, a long piece (~3 min) and a short piece (~1 min) to evaluate how quickly they can pick up the music. By singing with the group we can also see how they balance and blend.

We then ask them each to sing another prepared solo piece to finish the auditions. Usually we try to make the callbacks enjoyable by coming up with quirky questions that we all try to answer and also to see how the auditionees’ personalities fit into the group.

ACB: How does your group go about deciding which songs to add to its repertoire? Who is responsible for arrangements?

PT: Usually we look at our existing repertoire as well as the repertoire of other groups at the Claremont colleges to start looking for what kinds of songs we need to be doing. We strive to look for a balanced repertoire in terms of moods, and so we bounce ideas around usually for a couple of months even during break. At the beginning of each semester, we sit down and listen to a whole bunch of songs that people bring in and then figure out what we want to by two rounds of public vote, so we’re usually quite pleased by what we’ll be singing.

Of course, any repertoire is going to limited by the amount and quality of the arrangements, so we work as hard as we can to find people to arrange the songs. We have a number of theory students in the group that have lots of ear training so arrangements are usually done in a week or two. That said, poor arrangements still happen from time to time, and in that case we don’t shy away from purchasing them for about $75 to $150. It costs, but it means that we’ll have more time to rehearse songs that we always wanted to do but never arranged.

ACB: If you were to describe Midnight Echo in just three words, what words would you use?

PT: Crazy. Pants. Boombox.

ACB: What drew you, personally, to collegiate a cappella in the first place?

PT: I guess I did a bunch of singing in high school in Taiwan and I wanted to continue doing so in college, but I’d actually not heard of collegiate a cappella before I came here for college. I was drawn in by the concept and the challenge of doing a cappella singing, and I also wanted to be a better singer by practice. Plus it’s fun just hanging out with the group in crazy pants.

ACB: Is there anything else you would like to share with the readers of The A Cappella Blog?

PT: One thing that Midnight Echo does is that we always perform in what we call “crazy pants”, which are pants that are so outrageously different that you would probably never spot anyone wearing them. Each member finds their own pants, and we always get a great reaction from the audience when we show up on stage in this ridiculous outfit. In a way, it gives our group a fairly distinct personality from the other button-down-shirt-and-dress-wearing groups and allows the audience to relax quickly as well. However, we do still take our music seriously!

If you would like to learn more about Midnight Echo, you can visit them online here.