The Sunflower Harmony Chorus believes that all forms of music are beautiful, and with barbershop harmony, we can cross decades, genres, generations and even continents with the sound of harmony.

What makes barbershop harmony special are the four parts; No more and No less. Lead, Tenor, Baritone and Bass, and the special, intricate chords that they create.

If four women, one on each part, sang together, we'd call that a quartet. If more than four women come together, they bring a compilation of those four parts that we'll learn to balance in a chorus.

Barbershop Basics

In traditional barbershop style, each part finds its note off a single pitch, called the tonic of a chord, and blown on a pitch pipe (traditionally, a circular metal harmonica-like pipe with a chromatic octave's worth of notes.) Barbershop is designed to be sung a capella, that is, without accompaniment, and the defining characteristic of good barbershop is that all four parts "Lock and Ring." This phenomenon, Lock and Ring, creates the feeling that there is only one voice, not four, and the naturally occuring harmonics can ring tones that aren't even being sung. These ringing notes you hear above the notes actually being sung are what we call overtones.

Lead is usually the melody line in a quartet or chorus, and unlike other choral arrangements, Lead is the second highest voice in the mix, usually sung between the A below middle C and the C above middle C. The highest notes, are left to the angels and the Tenors, who are known for a light, bell-like harmony that caps of the 'cone' of a barbershop chord. The Bass is the lowest part in barbershop harmony, and it also should be the loudest, serving as a foundation for all the other sounds in our cone. The Baritone part is what makes this music barbershop - because it utilizes a part of a chord, the 7th, not usually used in other forms of music. If you want to learn excactly how these notes fit together chord by chord into a song, come visit us!

To learn more about where your voice would fit in, click here.

Our Chorus Repitoire includes (but is not limited to):

Raining Men by the Weathergirls
I Lift up my Head by Dottie Rambo
Can you feel the love tonight?
Feelin' Groovy (59th Street Bridge Song) by Simon and Garfunkel
Good ol' Acapella
Hot Time in the Old Town, arr. by Renee Craig
He was there
You are my Sunshine arr. by Volk
If
Time in a Bottle
Sweet Georgia Brown
It Don't mean a Thing (If it ain't got that swing)
Music of the Night
What a Wonderful World
YMCA by theVillage People