Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

by Mickey Rapkin

  It was a rough semester for the nascent a cappella group. A couple of girls had quit. Then a few more. Worse, while most a cappella groups were singing contemporary pop music, Divisi was still singing traditionals like “Catch a Falling Star.” Those were the arrangements they could find—easily, and inexpensively. They also wore unfortunate-looking green-and-yellow scarves. In the spring, the ladies traveled to Stanford to watch On the Rocks compete in the regional semifinals of the ICCAs. While the Ivy League schools out east had a long tradition of a cappella, the scene at the University of Oregon was only just beginning, and the girls wanted to show their support for their brother group. But it would be a seminal moment for Divisi.

  Seated in the Dinkelspiel Auditorium at Stanford, the girls caught UC Berkeley’s California Golden Overtones. Most of the all-female groups Evynne had seen before had been a complete mess. For one thing, they showed too much skin. (“If you have to ask,” Evynne says, “you’re showing too much.”) Second, they spent much of their time on stage tucking their hair behind their ears. But the California Golden Overtones, well, they were like nothing Divisi had seen before. They had a female beatboxer. They wore neckties. Their hair was pulled back, swept neatly away from their faces. They sang the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” medley from Moulin Rouge. It was a wake-up call.

  When Divisi returned to campus, they promptly dumped their Beau. Then they picked a new name. Sitting downstairs in their rehearsal space, Room 105 in the music building, Evynne pulled out a music dictionary, flipping through the pages, calling out musical terms. The girls very nearly became the Bel Cantos. But fairly quickly they settled on Divisi, which means “divided” in Italian. They divide music into parts, they figured. Evynne looked the room over. Of the original eight ladies, they were down to four. They needed bodies. And they needed a leader. On cue, a few weeks later, a pocket-size girl named Lisa Forkish walked into auditions.

  Lisa Forkish wasn’t even in college yet. Actually, she was still finishing up her junior year at South Eugene High School. On a lark, her boyfriend (also a junior) had decided to audition for On the Rocks. He lived locally, and he figured if the guys from OTR liked him enough, maybe they’d figure out a way for a high school kid to join. Lisa had gone along for the ride. It was serendipitous. Divisi happened to be holding auditions down the hall. Like Evynne before her, Lisa sang the national anthem. The girls fell in love with her. Though Lisa was still technically a high school student, that fall she enrolled in a yoga class on campus and became a full-fledged member of Divisi. Her boyfriend, likewise, joined On the Rocks.

  The fall of 2002 gave way to the fall of 2003. Lisa Forkish was now a full-time student, very likely the only freshman living in an off-campus apartment with seniors. That year Divisi competed in their first ICCAs. And in short, they had their fishnets handed to them. They sang Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited” and quickly learned an unspoken ICCA rule: Don’t perform someone else’s signature song. Especially in competition. “We sang that Alanis song last year,” one of the girls from the USC Sirens said to Lisa after the show. Divisi did win one award that night: Most Testosterone. This was meant to be a compliment. There is a generally acknowledged bias against all-female groups in the a cappella community. People complain they sound shrill. Well, that’s because women are essentially missing an entire half of the keyboard. Men can sing high, floating into their falsetto (think Frankie Valli or Justin Timberlake). But a woman just can’t hit a low D. Actually, if a woman can hit a C below middle C, it’s notable. Two—count ’em, two—of the Divisi girls could comfortably (and consistently) hit that guttural C. Though the girls hadn’t placed in the competition, suddenly everyone was talking about the Divisi sound.

  Lisa Forkish relished her time with Divisi, but truth be told, she’d never really wanted to go to the University of Oregon. She always saw herself at the Berklee College of Music in Boston (alums include John Mayer, Gillian Welch, and Branford Marsalis). But when she graduated from high school she wasn’t quite ready to leave Divisi behind. She’d been admitted to Berklee, but she deferred for a year. Now she deferred again. There was something about Divisi. She thought they had a good shot at taking the ICCA title and she wanted to be onstage when they did.

  And so, in 2003, Divisi competed for a second time. They added choreography. They had a surprise in their back pocket—a girl-power medley Lisa arranged, which opened with the gospel strains of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” and worked through everything from the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” to the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.” Divisi won their regional competition and went on to the semifinals at Stanford. They placed third, but it could have gone either way. The men of Fermata Nowhere—a young group from Mt. San Antonio College—took second place, but even they believed Divisi had been robbed. When the boys went up onstage to collect their award, they all pointed at Divisi and bowed their heads in respect.

  The car ride back to Oregon was uncomfortable. The girls felt their performance had been solid. How can we be better next year? Someone suggested a medley of colors, featuring Coldplay’s “Yellow,” “Lady in Red,” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” It was a terrible idea. Lisa once again called the Berklee admissions office, asking to defer enrollment for a third time. Instead, they revoked her admission.

  Divisi continued to think about—obsess over, really—the ICCAs. That summer, listening to the radio in her parents’ 1983 maroon Honda Civic, Evynne Smith had a better idea. She called a meeting. Most of the Divisi girls lived locally (with the rest in Portland) and she invited them over to her family’s house. That’s where she suggested the Usher song. Anna Corbett nearly spit up her soda.

  The girls were resistant. But Evynne arranged the song anyway. And she took risks. (Quick music lesson: An arrangement is the song broken up by voice part. Imagine an orchestral score, but instead of a part for the clarinets and another for the bassoons, a cappella music is arranged by voice parts, writing out dims and bops for the sopranos, the altos, and so forth. Not all of Divisi reads music, so some members have to learn their parts by ear.) In the lead-up to the bridge, Evynne threw in the bass line to Tupac’s “California Love.” She had the girls sing this refrain over the outro: “Divisi knows how to party // Yeah, Divisi knows how to party.” Erica Barkett (a Divisi member and a dance instructor at a local studio) added the choreography. And the girls spent much of that first semester of 2004 practicing their three-song set, which included Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” and Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.” They went to Erica’s studio, the one near the Safeway, and practiced in front of the mirrors. One of the girls, Joanne, picked up the choreography quickly. “Do it like this,” Erica shouted, frustrated with the lot of them. “Do it ghetto like Joanne!” Joanne is now a dental hygienist, a career move that surprised no one. That she could do anything ghetto struck the girls as impossibly funny, and this became a popular cry that year.

  Musically Divisi had advanced considerably since that first competition. But something else had changed: They were hungry.

  Three hours before showtime, the girls would sit in a circle. Each would say something she loved about the person to her right. They would talk about the music. “This song, ‘Walking on Broken Glass,’ sounds happy,” Lisa said. “But it’s really about this woman who is brokenhearted and wants to be empowered. We have to empower her. That’s our job as backup—to support her.” Deke Sharon judged that semifinal round. On his score sheet, he described Divisi as “rough and tight.” The phrase became a Divisi mantra. They considered naming their next album “Rough and Tight” but decided against it, fearing someone might mistake it for some unfortunate sexual condition.

  Divisi bested a tough field at the regional semifinals, including Brigham Young’s polished Vocal Point. The BYU boys had won the West Coast semifinals before but had never actually made it to New York. The ICCA finals are often held on Sundays, and the Mormons wouldn’t compete on the sabbath. In 2005, however, the finals wer
e scheduled for a Saturday night. The boys had set their sights on New York. They hadn’t counted on Divisi shutting them down. And how.

  On the car ride back to Eugene the girls from Divisi talked excitedly about the ICCAs and what Broadway shows they wanted to see when they got to New York.

  In April of 2005, Evynne Smith, Lisa Forkish, and Divisi flew to New York for the finals of the ICCAs. One of the girls, Suzie Day, made goody bags for the trip, including mouthwash, gum, tissues, and a Snickers candy bar. The night before the show, the girls hung out at their Manhattan hotel with Lisa Forkish’s boyfriend, the one who’d auditioned for On the Rocks back in high school dragging Lisa along for the ride. Believe it or not, he was now a member of the Yale Duke’s Men, who would be competing against Lisa and Divisi the next night at Lincoln Center. Well, maybe competing wasn’t the word. He’d seen Divisi perform. The Duke’s Men didn’t have shot, he said. They were just happy to be in New York.

  Four short years after dumping their Beau Tie, Divisi was huddled backstage at Lincoln Center. They were the favorites to win. There was tension in the air. There were tears. But more than anything, there was an air of confidence surrounding this group of women. They had done the work. This was supposed to be the fun part, Lisa kept reminding them. Just before they went onstage, Lisa turned to the girls with one last bit of advice. “Do it ghetto like Joanne,” she said.

  Divisi walked onto the stage at Alice Tully Hall. “Woodstock” was more emotional than it had ever been. “Yeah” brought the audience to their feet. Evynne nailed the rap. The girls ran offstage, and they were laughing. They couldn’t contain themselves—it had gone that well. The judges broke to deliberate and finally the seven competing groups were called back onstage. A few cursory awards were handed out. Erica Barkett from Divisi won the award for best choreography. The girls were feeling good, especially when the impressive University of Rochester Midnight Ramblers took third place.

  Then it happened.

  Lisa doesn’t remember much about the next minute, other than walking out to accept the award for second place, looking back at Divisi and thinking, This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. The Dear Abbeys from Boston University were crowned the 2005 ICCA champions. It’s not often that a Lincoln Center crowd boos, but that’s just what happened.

  The tears didn’t come until the girls were safely backstage. “This is bullshit!” one of them yelled. It got worse. Barry Carl from Rockapella pulled Lisa aside and explained that two of the three judges had placed Divisi first. The final judge—Judith Clurman of Juilliard, the lone woman on the panel—had placed the girls at a distant fourth. It was an intentional snub. There was no other way to interpret it. If Clurman had ranked Divisi even third, the girls from Oregon would have taken the title. But she didn’t, and the message was clear: This woman from Julliard had blackballed them. Divisi turned to her score sheet for some insight into the woman’s thinking. But her comments were impossibly vague. For Divisi, the hurt turned to rage. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.

  But nothing could be done. Divisi collected their belongings and left Alice Tully Hall. There was an officially sanctioned after-party for the ICCAs, though the line stretched out the door. The girls had an entourage of seventy-five with them, including most of their families and the men of On the Rocks, who had surprised them by flying out to New York. The girls decided to skip the after-party altogether, cramming into a Chinese restaurant around the corner instead. The kitchen was about to close, but the owner agreed to keep the restaurant open if the girls promised to spend enough money. And so they piled in, ordered plates of food, and before long, there were calls for an encore. Standing on chairs with tears streaming down their faces, the girls sang the Divisi medley, the one that begins with “Like a Prayer.” There would be more tears that night as the twelve ladies of Divisi, still in their bright red lipstick and red ties, huddled together on the subway platform. They stood in a circle, locked arms, and launched into the familiar strains of “Woodstock”: “I don’t know who I am // But you know life is for learning // And we’ve got to get ourselves // Back to the garden.”

  A few weeks later, the a cappella message boards at rarb.org (RARB is the Recorded A Cappella Review Board, a digital outpost for a cappella fans far and wide) lit up with a curious thread. The ICCA organizers had announced a surprise change to the competition rules going forward—a direct response to the Divisi ouster. Even the owner of the ICCAs, Don Gooding, admitted, “The girls were robbed.” The new rules were as follows: There would be five judges at the finals, not three. And much like the Olympic games, the high and low scores would be thrown out. No single judge would ever again have the power to blackball a group.

  This was little consolation to Lisa Forkish and Divisi. Back in Oregon, the girls in the red ties decided to take the 2005-2006 school year off from competition. The dream was not dead, just tucked away. Instead they’d focus on recording an album, Undivided. The inside jacket photo showed the girls, arm-in-arm, onstage at Lincoln Center. Nothing could divide them. The album, featuring “Yeah,” was released to wide acclaim, snagging the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Award for Best Female Collegiate Album. “Yeah” was selected for inclusion in Varsity Vocals’ Best of College A Cappella compilation (BOCA). The group even traveled to California to perform at Disneyland. But there were tough days too. Like when one of the Divisi members was busted for embezzling money from the group’s bank account. Or when they traveled to New York again for a gig at Columbia University—and got in a disagreement with the host group, an all-male group from Columbia who’d promoted their concert with an image of Terri Schiavo, which upset the women of Divisi. But Divisi had established itself as a powerhouse.

  Where to go from there proved problematic. Lisa Forkish sang for one more year, even though she’d dropped out of school. (She’d reapplied to Berklee, didn’t need the Oregon credits, and decided to get a teaching job in Eugene.) She’s not the only one who stuck around campus for a victory lap. Several of the original Divisi girls were still singing with the group even though they’d graduated. They couldn’t shake this thing they’d built.

  This would nearly cripple Divisi. Most a cappella groups, on average, lose four members in the spring and replace them in the fall. It helps maintain continuity. But in June of 2006, Divisi graduated eight girls. Two others, though still students at Oregon, decided the time commitment was just too much, and so they retired. Divisi had committed to competing in the 2006-2007 ICCAs, but they’d need a whole new roster to get there. Not to mention soloists. One of their best singers, Katie Hopkins, had graduated. “She sang like Mariah Carey,” says Keeley McCowan, one of the last members still around in the fall of 2006. “We need a new Mariah.”

  There’s an a cappella tradition at the University of Oregon. Every Friday at four-thirty P.M., On the Rocks and Divisi invade the campus student center, the EMU, to put on a free a cappella concert. And no matter what is happening in class or in their personal lives, these singers can count on getting a boost every Friday afternoon as three hundred students crowd into the EMU to watch them perform. (This self-same student center famously played home to the food fight scene in Animal House. That it’s since been hijacked by girls singing Annie Lennox covers would no doubt kill John Belushi—if he weren’t already dead.)

  On this late September afternoon in 2006, Evynne Smith (now a performer on the Royal Caribbean cruise line) pulls into port in San Francisco. Her cell phone goes off. She looks down. It’s a text message from Lisa Forkish, who is now (finally) a student at Berklee. Four years after leaving high school, Lisa has begun her undergraduate degree again. From scratch.

  Evynne looks at her watch. It’s four-thirty P.M. on Friday. The text message from Lisa reads: “Hello, Divisi ladies, I love you.” Her phone buzzes again. It is Erica Barkett, who has written more or less the same thing. This will repeat itself every Friday for much of the next year. At Berklee, Lisa starts an all-female a cappella group, but even sh
e acknowledges it’s not the same thing.

  Back in Eugene, meanwhile, Keeley McCowan and Sarah Klein, the only two girls who remain from Divisi’s first incarnation, stand in the rehearsal room looking at the twelve girls gathered before them. Keeley (pale, stern, with twenty pounds she’s been meaning to lose for years) and Sarah (like a Jewish Marlee Matalin) will lead the group through the first Friday-afternoon performance of the year. They look around the room at this group of mostly strangers. They are the only two who remember firsthand the work it took to get to Lincoln Center; the only two who remember the ache, the disappointment. They are the last of the proud “rough and tight.” Though more than a year has gone by since that night in New York, the wound is still raw. Sarah, who arranged “Woodstock,” whose MySpace page reads Will Sing for Food, will be Divisi’s new music director. She tells the new girls about the eight-week plan, the one Lisa Forkish devised to whip the group into shape for competition.

  Peter Hollens, the founder of On the Rocks, still lives in town. Actually, he’s engaged to Evynne Smith, and while she’s sailing with the Monarch of the Seas, he’s opened his own recording studio catering to a cappella. He goes to the first EMU performance to watch the new Divisi perform. The girls are shaky. He calls Evynne. “I don’t think Divisi should compete this year,” he says. He’s worried that they will ruin the reputation Evynne and Lisa and the rest of the girls worked so hard to build. “They need more time,” Peter said.