Acappella
Or is it "A Cappella?"
Lately, collegiate a cappella music has received a lot of attention in pop culture and professional media, and I thought it would be good to give a little introduction to the genre targeted toward the uninitiated or "a-cappella-curious." I find that it's simultaneously quite easy, and quite difficult to define what exactly "a cappella" music is - it depends on how specific you want to be.
For example, a cappella music exists in virtually every human culture, regardless of their economic or technological status. It includes everything from religious forms to secular songs, solo pieces to choral works, music old and new. When you sing in the shower, you're singing a cappella. With so many types of music that could be considered "a cappella," how do we come to a single definition?
It turns out that it's all in the name - a name that is often misspelled, misused, and mispronounced. The term "a cappella" (which in Italian means "from the choir"), is meant to indicate unaccompanied singing, and while the term came into use as early as Italian Renaissance, the actual style of unaccompanied singing dates back to the dawn of mankind's ability to separate sounds into logical groupings - to the very beginnings of music itself!
Although many cultures have their own terms for unaccompanied singing, the term "a cappella" has fixed itself as a common designator of such music. This is probably because Italian remains the dominant language of the classical musical language, and Italian terms continue to dominate printed music in much of the world, even in the realm of pop music. If you've ever looked at a piece of sheet music and wondered why "p" doesn't stand for "soft" and "f" doesn't stand for "loud," it's because they DO stand for those terms, in Italian. You can also frequently find "a cappella" printed above sections designed to be sung without instrumental backup.
Nevertheless, most a cappella music comes from cultures without strict written forms, and much of it is an auditory tradition. Chances are, your local gospel choir or collegiate a cappella group learns their music largely "by ear." The entire culture of modern a cappella is driven by the relationship between voices and ears. It's hardly surprising that the words "a cappella" themselves would have gotten mangled by being passed along in this fashion, rather than written down.
The Internet in particular is full of spellings like "acapella", "a capella", "acapela", and "a capela", which creates a particular difficulty in a genre where so much content is grouped by user-added "tags," and the search engine is the primary way to locate material online. Search engines often see "acapella" and "a cappella" as two completely different terms, and improper spelling might lead to vastly reduced results. I've had to tag many of my own songs with multiple spellings (including those mentioned above) just to ensure that people who are searching for a cappella music will find it, regardless of their spelling. Nevertheless, it makes more sense just to promote the proper spelling of the term - as a cappella music becomes more popular among young people, now is definitely the time to pass along a little visual identity, in addition to the auditory.
Although I'm sure that this post will be tagged with a variety of different spellings, so that people will be able to find it when they search for "aw capeluh."
... Well, maybe not that last one.
Written by Jesse Buddington
