Sweet Adelines International 75th Jubilee Commemorative Album

SPOTLIGHT: TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION Rehearsals — my, how they’ve changed over the years! From the days when we called them “meetings” and we sat in chairs and learned music off the printed page to now when we use our mobile phones to record our music, iPads to videotape new choreography, and Skype or Zoom for coaching sessions, our rehearsals look nothing like they did in 1945.

In the early days, most music scores were handwritten by the arranger. The technology used just to print the music has since evolved along with everything else through the years. The purple printed music pictured here is a product of a spirit duplicator. Arrangers now have access to computer programs like Finale to help them with the creation of their works. In the past, mimeographed documents, created by cutting a stencil by typewriter, were used for most printed documents, including The Pitch Pipe. Other printing devices and processes we used in the past are: Addressograph, Multigraph, and Ditto machines. The copying technologies of today were not even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. We’ve come a long way in a very short 75 years. Let’s wander back in time to remember how we used to learn. The gathering of singers would sit in chairs, all voice parts in the same room seated in sections. The director (presumably) taught a phrase to one voice part, then taught the same phrase to a second voice part, followed by the third and fourth in like fashion. And, if a chorus was fortunate enough to have a member who read music and played a keyboard, such folks sometimes made a piano-only recording of each voice part. This was time-consuming but it worked! Section rehearsals — now primarily used to unify section singing — were yet another method of learning notes and words. And then came the portable recorders — cassette tapes were a game changer for sure! Now we could record our rehearsals and take the tapes home or play them in our cars to learn faster and make our rehearsals more efficient and effective.

Sweet Adeline International Headquarters employees alongside the technologies of 1957.

In the early days, most music scores were handwritten by the arranger. This purple printed music is a product of a spirit duplicator.

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