Aragon’s male choir students participated in the Real Men Sing Choral Festival on Friday Oct. 9 at San Jose State University. Over 500 students from various schools attended and sang together, forming a mass choir with the purpose of allowing male students to perform in an environment of singers with lower ranges.
The event was started by Dr. Jeffrey Benson, Director of Choral Activities at San José State University. “[Benson] teaches us the music, which takes us about an hour and a half of rehearsing with a bunch of schools; then after that we go to this cathedral and we perform with about 400 men [sic],” says senior Jerome Vincent.
Junior Gabriel Igtanloc adds, “I had to sight read all the music because it was given to me the day of. The men’s choir actually worked on the music previously.”
This event provides an opportunity for students around the Bay to sing with a different arrangement of singers. Choir director John Chen says, “Usually choirs, if a school is fortunate enough to have a choir, have SATB, which is [a] soprano, alto, tenor, bass choir. Not often do singers, especially [in] high school, get to experience singing just voice specific music, [in this case] TTBB: tenor, tenor, bass, bass music.”
The vocal range of singers can be described in various categories. For men, this ranges from the lowest voices, bass, to the highest, tenor. Women are usually categorized as alto and soprano, so when there are only men singing, the vocal range is much lower. This changes how singers adapt to new voices around them.
Chen adds, “At our school we’re fortunate enough to have a tenor, tenor, bass, bass men’s choir. Some schools do not have that chance. Even though our school has a men’s choir, it has only 20 people, so it’s a [very] different experience to sing with 500 guys.”
The students performed a wide variety of music ranging from love ballads to upbeat folk songs. Vincent says, “My favorite song was “Saw My Father.” It’s a sad song about a soldier who died during the civil war, but it’s really beautiful with 400 men singing it.”
Chen says, “It’s good to experience voice pipe and how other schools function because when you get there you’re not just sitting there in your own school, you’re surrounded by all other schools and you’re surrounded by singers of all different voice types. They might sound different. They might have different experience, different levels.”
Not only did this provide students with the opportunity to sing with different types of singers, but it also broke a commonly held stigma. Vincent says, “I got to see how other school’s music program is like for men because there’s this idea that men don’t like to sing in front of people, but then you see 400 men singing together and it’s awesome.”
Junior Kiernan Manu adds, “This festival … really inspired me to pursue music in the future because of its great community.”
