Quantcast
Nerds rejoice! A cappella is in vogue – Metro US

Nerds rejoice! A cappella is in vogue

Look out band members, the cult television show “Glee,” has moved the cool spotlight to high school singers like Katie Dubbs, a senior at Horace Mann, a private school in Riverdale. She’s put together a citywide a cappella festival this Friday at her school — Acappellooza.

Dubbs sings in Horace Mann’s glee club The HarMannics, but she organized the event to raise funds for an a cappella singing club at the Bronx Center for Science and Math, a public high school. She got BCSM’s club going after winning the $2,500 2009 Alexander Capelluto Award, named for Horace Mann’s 2004 valedictorian who died in a bicycle accident after his sophomore year at Yale University, where a cappella singing is big. (It’s so big there that students put out a musical admissions video, “That’s Why I Chose Yale.”)

“It’s a bridge between singing professionally with training and singing in the shower,” Dubbs said. “It’s huge in college. It’s definitely growing in high school.”

Is “Glee” responsible for the surge? “It’s just a TV show,” she said. “The voices are automated and tweaked in a studio.” But, she admitted, she’s addicted to it.