Among the memorable, music-related moments in Mayberry, on the classic TV sitcom The Andy Griffith Show, is when a jealous Deputy Barney Fife tries to talk a golden-voiced bumpkin-type named Rafe Hollister out of entering the town's singing contest.
Barney: "They're liable to ask you questions only a trained musician understands.
Rafe: Like what?
Barney: Well, suppose they was to ask, "Can you sing a cappella?" Would you know what to do?
Rafe: No.
Barney: There you are. Why get up and embarrass yourself?
Andy: Hey, Barn, suppose they ask if you can sing a cappella. What will you do?
Barney: Well, I'd do it. (He begins to sing jazzily, snapping his fingers.) "Ah-ca-PELL-ah, ah-ca-PELL-ah, dah-dah-dah-dum-dah-dah ... " I don't remember the rest of the words.
The goofy deputy could get straightened out with a visit to a 10-day, mostly free festival at the Kennedy Center opening on Wednesday called "A Cappella: Singing Solo." Well, maybe not entirely straightened out, since some of the performers will be warbling with instruments behind them - unaccompanied singing is the most widely understood definition of a cappella.
Still, the festival is predominantly about voices operating on their own, and it promises an exceptionally wide sampling of singers and repertoire, including music from the 15th and 16th centuries, when the term a cappella came into wide usage.
Some scholarship points to the Vatican's Sistine Chapel - Cappella Sistina, in Italian - as the probable source for that term. A cappella literally means "in the style of the chapel" (or church), and a lot of early church music, far beyond the Vatican, was sung unaccompanied. By the 19th century, any kind of unaccompanied vocal music was described as a cappella.
Most of the Kennedy Center festival will be free, with performances held on the Millennium Stage in the Grand Foyer, which can cram in 4,000 people. Large video screens will bring the performers closer to those away from the stage area. (A ticketed event in the center's Concert Hall featuring vocalist Bobby McFerrin and several a cappella groups is sold out.)
"The impulse behind the festival is something that [Kennedy Center president] Michael Kaiser had taken note of," says Garth Ross, director of the center's Performing Arts for Everyone program. "It's the way that connectiveness to style has begun to diminish, as artists take styles across national borders."
