The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts February 16, 2007

Obertones Take A Cappella to Eastern Europe
 
Obertones Angels: The a cappella group shares love of music and college experience with international students on their first European tour.
 

While you were holed up in your room at home flipping between the Food Channel and VH1 (who can resist the delicious combination of Rachael Ray and Flavor Flav?), putting off reading the complete sonnets of Shakespeare until the last week of January, there were seven members of this campus making a fast-paced musical tour of Eastern Europe.

A campus a cappella group, the Obertones, embarked on their first Eastern European tour. 

Organized by senior Nick Aszling beforehand and by junior Alex Paik on tour, the rest of the touring group consisted of first-years Sturdy Knight and Colin Ahearn and juniors Matt Castleman, Sam Alfiler and Rick Lawrence.

Financed largely by the group’s fundraising efforts beforehand and CD sales while on tour (although some money came out of the members’ own pockets), the group made their way by train from Munich through Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, Hamburg and Amsterdam.

The touring life is nothing new to these talented voices; the group had previously toured California.

The idea for the tour came one day this past spring when Connie McCaslin, the mother of sophomore non-member Henry McCaslin, e-mailed the group after hearing them perform on campus. At the time, her husband was working in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, although he had been transferred to Warsaw by the time the tour happened, and their children had attended various international schools around Europe.

Impressed by the Obertones’ performance, McCaslin thought they might provide some much-needed exposure to musical performance to the students at these schools.

In Paik’s words, the purpose of the tour was to “spread an unabashed joy for music,” while also taking the opportunity to inform the students at these schools about life in college in the United States. College admissions officials often overlook international schools. On the same token, many international students know little about life in the States, even if they are citizens.

Paik attended an international school in Seoul, Korea, for several years and sympathized with the students’ situations.

“These schools are based in the countryside, the activities available to them are only those offered by the school itself…sound familiar?”

While we here in Ohio may relate, Oberlin has a rich array of student organizations and activities to offer us for which these schools simply do not have the resources.

The result is that kids are left largely to their own devices and are more excited at the prospect of drinking at a club in the city than singing in a choir on the weekends.

It’s not cool to sing, Aszling and Paik noted with chagrin, and the boys especially are ostracized for engaging in the performing arts. The Obertones hoped to show them “that people do these things for fun — not just credit.”

It seems safe to say that they succeeded wildly. The Obertones were shocked at the enthusiasm they met at each of these schools. The group performed at lunch periods or special assemblies set up by school officials who had little idea what they were in for.

“Most places expected an eight- to twelve-man choir singing hymns with a faculty director and a tour bus,” Aszling and Paik laughed. “Meanwhile, there’s us with a bus ticket and hardly any money in our wallets.”

The kids at these schools packed into rooms to hear the singers and begged for autographs when they finished.

In Warsaw, Aszling reports with evident amazement, “kids were running back to the cafeteria to get paper plates for us to autograph.”

The group stayed after each performance to speak to the kids, encouraging them to take an interest in music and to inform them about life outside their small communities, urging them to look into college in the U.S.

The kids were so receptive that when the group organized a low key a cappella learning session with a group of fifth graders in Warsaw, they were shocked to arrive to a packed room filled with quiet, well-behaved boys, all of whom had arrived an hour before school started to learn how to sing a cappella.

“It just goes to show how much outreach they need from the States,” said Paik.

 The Obertones enjoyed the star treatment they got at each school, but more than that, they were touched to see how “successful [we were] in inspiring the kids.”

While the group wasn’t belting tunes to enthusiastic schoolchildren, they were singing in the street, exploring the tourist sites (and the nightlife) of each city or rushing to make the next performance on time.

They had a wide variety of entertaining tales, from the time they sang to prostitutes in the street in the red light district of Hamburg, to meeting the U.S. Ambassador to Poland (a man named Victor Ashe, also George W. Bush’s roommate at Yale) and discovering the joys of Czech hot dogs.

“We only ate hot dogs in Prague,” Aszling and Paik enthused.

While Paik and Aszling agreed that the tour was largely a success, Paik noted that the group “performed once or twice nearly every day and we were always traveling, usually by night train which was really rough on our health and performance. We also didn’t get as much time as we would have desired in every city because we were always on the move and our group budget didn’t include tourism, food or places to stay.”

Thus, while they’re planning to do the tour again, it didn’t go off completely without a hitch. This first experience will inform future engagements.

Currently, the Obertones are working on recording an album.

To see some pictures of the tour (and to find out what our ambassador to Poland really looks like), check out the Embassy website: http://warsaw.usembassy.gov/poland/obertones.html.


 
 
   

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