Barbershopping Made Easy

If the Armed Forces Institute has its way, the venerable art of barbershop singing will soon reach an unprecedented degree of literacy and technical perfection. To teach G.I. Joe how to sing close, the Institute last week published a manual entitled How to Sing and Read Music. It contained more new tricks of sound musical pedagogy than civilian pedagogues have thought up in a long time.

The most remarkable feature of the manual is its method of teaching soldiers to read music as well as to sing. The method uses a simplified system of notation in which the notes look like the holes and slits in an old-fashioned player-piano roll (see cut). By watching them carefully, even the untutored amateur can gauge his rhythm, making the long notes properly long and the short ones correctly short. Added helps are provided by cartoons (by New Yorker Cartoonist Charles Addams, now with the armed forces) which tellingly illustrate the significance of scale steps, sharps and flats (see cuts) etc.

The manual was worked out by U.S.O. Music Division Chief Raymond Kendall, with Houghton Mifflin's William Spaulding. It is to be used in connection with nine recordings of popular barbershop numbers. At first the record plays a selection emphasizing the lead, tenor and bass successively, to give the G.I. student the idea. Then it supplies the missing parts, so that the G.I. can learn in turn to sing lead, tenor and bass. By the time he is through the cycle, the G.I. has become an all-round barbershop expert, able to sound off, at the clearing of a throat, with any part of Old Man River or In the Evening by the Moonlight.

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