McFerrin leads master class, singing with a cappella groups

McFerrin, a classical conductor and recording artist best known for the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” performed before a packed audience on Tuesday night. At the end of the show, 40 University students from 12 different a cappella groups — who participated in a workshop with McFerrin before the show — joined him to sing on stage.

Halcyon Person ’10, former president of Shere Kahn, said Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Thomas Dunne approached her to help organize the workshop in mid-January after McFerrin expressed interest in working with students before his scheduled performance. The event was primarily coordinated by Christine Whalen, production associate for McCarter Theatre.

Person said that she reached out to students from campus a cappella groups to participate in a workshop with McFerrin that took place on Tuesday. The same students took a master class with McFerrin’s musical director and producer, Roger Treece, on Monday.

Both Treece and McFerrin emphasized the idea of “in-the-moment music.” In a vocal exercise during the workshop, McFerrin improvised parts for the sopranos, altos, tenors and basses and then alternately called on each group to sing its parts aloud.

Person said this contrasted with normal a cappella work, which involves strictly rehearsing songs that often have been passed down from year to year. The improvisational singing style was “different and for that reason, exciting,” she said, especially considering the group’s size. “He’ll bring us into it as part of the musical machine that he’s making.”

During the workshop, McFerrin told the students, “Songs just simply erupt out of my body ... As singers, songs should just be on our lips all the time.”

Person said the chance to speak with McFerrin and watch him perform was a rare opportunity. “You get to see the cogs in his mind spinning ... You see what a genius he is at it,” she said.

McFerrin said during the workshop that rather than following a set program of songs during a performance, he instead feels out the mood of the audience. He added that he wrote “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” in roughly an hour, and that he has not sung it in 22 years.

Several hours later on stage, McFerrin improvised vocal effects, creating beats and melodies by clapping his hand to his chest and pressing the microphone to his neck. No instruments were used during the show, though he tapped his feet and handled the microphone as if it were a trumpet.

When McFerrin used lyrics, they ranged from common refrains like “twinkle, twinkle little star” to matter-of-fact statements like “I just ate at Masala Grill, I believe it’s on Chambers Street.”

Throughout the show, he engaged with the audience, encouraging all the listeners to sing background scales and inviting volunteers to sing with him on stage.

“It’s such an amazing opportunity to be with a musical genius,” Shere Kahn member Jessica Cabral ’11 said.

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She added that she enjoyed being able to sing with representatives from different a cappella groups on campus. “They all have their own sound,” she said.

“It’s really interesting that he’s bringing all of us into the show,” Roaring 20 member Spencer Bowley ’11 said. “It’s not that he’s making [music], it just happens.”