The Voice in the Chorus While the musical had played to sold-out performances throughout its first week, the focus of critics, and members of the audience alike, was less and less on the lead singers than on the beautiful, bell-like tone coming from the thirteen-member, allfemale chorus. The chorus, typically a place where ingénues got their first taste of the Broadway stage, had become the principal draw in a musical with no-less-thancompelling star turns from the frontline performers. But the near perfect, bell-like timbre emanating from within a chorus that seemed to enwrap this uniquely angelic sound in its communal strains, while at the same time allowing it to sing out in its ring-line tones, began to create a demand to understand its origin. The music director, while saying he would love to take credit for the beauty of the sound, insisted the voicing that was created by the chorus was not necessarily what he was going for when he auditioned potential members. He said he was simply following the guidance of the composers who wrote the choral parts to support the solos of the principal performers. Nonetheless, to the growing annoyance of the play’s producers, the unique voicing of the chorus had become the musical’s trademark and a growing internet sensation. Numerous unauthorized recordings of it surfaced on the social networking sites and YouTube, quickly going viral on a worldwide basis. Those postings, in turn, engendered a call for discovering the source of the voicing. Typical of cyber sensations the movement soon grew into a contest of near frenetic proportions as to who would unravel the mystery of the musical phenomenon. Suggestions ranged from complex mathematical interpretations to videos of drunken frat boys croaking through choral ranges from bass to falsetto, in lame, sometimes downright ludicrous, attempts to recreate the sound in their YouTube postings. The ongoing attention was a tremendous boon to ticket sales, delighting the producers but viewed as a pyrrhic victory by the composers, who felt creatively slighted by people attending performances for the wrong reason. They determined to strip away the layers of mystery surrounding the unique sound and explain it once and for all. First, they listened to the chorus, without any of the soloists, a good start because there it was, the bell-like tone. But when they tried to zero in on which performer, or combination of performers, was most likely the source of the sound, the search became problematic. Sometimes it sounded as if some melding of all the voices somehow managed to produce the beautiful timbre that at the same time appeared to be separate and apart from the choir-like sound of the full chorus. Other times it sounded as if it must be coming from an individual singer. In either case, the sound was always there. Next they tried stripping away individual performers to see if that would expose a single singer responsible for the sound. But various combinations of singers managed
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