Best Form of College Singing?

Lowbrow Answer: A Capella

I know that when I got to college, my first thoughts were "How can I spend more time standing in a half-circle with a bunch of dudes in khaki pants?" and "How can I sing Dave Matthews Band songs to idiot freshman girls?" Boom. A Capella. Done.

The worst part about this shit are the names. The groups are always one of two things. Either they're a semi-clever play on words like, "The A Capellicans" or they're silly and whimsical, like "The Whiffenpoofs." Either way, they're fucking stupid. College A Capella is like Coldplay: the only people who actually like it are 40-year-old middle-aged white women.

Middlebrow Answer: University Chorus
At big schools, the university chorus is totally legit. They usually have a hundred voices, all of whom can actually sing, and get to do stuff like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The best part, though, is that they all have these ancient school songs that they sing. Shit like, "I Left My Heart at Old Cornell" and "Michigan, Michigan." Lemme tell you. When you hear a full choir sing one of those old tunes, it sounds like a barbershop quartet on steroids.

Of course, for every badass school song you're singing, you're singing four contemporary pieces of shit. And you're often forced to combine with other school choirs to do big numbers. Fuck that. I don't want to dillute my gene pool by mixing some lowbrow school. If I go to Cornell and you go to Ohio State, that means I don't have to talk to you because you're too stupid to understand the words I'm using.


Highbrow: Chamber Ensemble
Chamber ensembles allow you to sing stuff by guys likeThomas Tallis. Tallis composed music in the 16th century for Queen Elizabeth. His most epic piece is called "Spem in Alium" and was composed for the Queen's coronation. No big deal, but it has 40 different parts. Forty. Different. Parts. Musicians today are lightweight. Imagine John Mayer trying to come up with forty different vocal harmonies. His head would probably explode, finally revealing to the world that he's just a robot controlled by a tiny gerbil.

The music sung in chamber ensembles is also generally so old that it's a capella, which is great because I hate instrumentalists. Look, I know that playing the piano is hard, but you're just pushing buttons in a sequence. We could program a computer to do the same thing. Get off your high horse, pianists of the world, I'm through living under your tyranny.