Northeastern University’s treble group took first place at the International Championship of College A Cappella regional round and is headed to the New York finals — with a set list of Sacred Harp and Styx.
Olivia Materetsky stands in the center of the low-lit stage, fellow members of the Northeastern University treble a cappella group Pitch, Please! arranged in a circle around her clad in black sequins and gold jewelry. She raises her hand and sings a few starting notes, kicking off the group’s set in the Northeast regional round of the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella in Boston — one that opens with a big, risky choice.
Following her lead, the ensemble of women launches into an arrangement “Frontier” by electronic artist Holly Herndon — a thumping, ferocious performance with the feeling of a tribal chant let loose.“Frontier” is an example of Sacred Harp singing, a choral style rooted in ancient Ireland and sung predominantly in rural church gatherings in the South. There are no set pitches, cutoffs or conventional sheet music: Sacred Harp, also called “shape singing,” hinges on listening and blending. Singers stand facing each other in a vocal echo chamber, creating a booming wall of sound.
“That moment sets the tone for the next 10 minutes,” says Chloe Cohen, the group’s president. “Like, yeah, we’re here. And we wanna kill it.”
From there, the group transitions into arrangements of “Radio,” by Vienna Teng (with a big-belting lead vocal from mezzo soprano Oli Leto) and “Renegade,” by Styx (Bethany Davies, the group’s assistant music director and choreographer, takes lead vocals). The finale is a quiet, dark rendition of the lullaby “You Are My Sunshine.”
“It’s shocking to the audience,” says Davies, who sings Alto II and Bass.
But that element of surprise has been a winning one. Pitch, Please! grabbed first place at regionals and will be a strong contender at the national finals in Manhattan on April 26. There, they will compete with nine other groups from across the U.S. and the U.K.“It’s a crazy experience for me,” says Davies, who is in just her second year with the group and first foray into the world of ICCA, the competition very much like the one at the center of the movie “Pitch Perfect.” “I’ve never done something like this before, and I’m so ready to get on that stage.”
Their deep ICCA run marks the culmination of a pointed evolution under the leadership of Materetsky, a fifth-year music industry student and the group’s music director (and award-winning vocal percussionist). When she came on as a freshman in 2020, Pitch gravitated more toward arrangements of the pop radio hits more typical in a cappella: “Locked out of Heaven” by Bruno Mars; “The Other Side” from the movie musical “The Greatest Showman.”
“They sounded awesome in those first couple of years,” Materetsky says. “They had some insane soprano singers. … I get scared when I hear their old recordings, in a good way.”
But the group’s current iteration aims to push the boundaries of what a 10-minute a cappella set can do — in terms of storytelling, musical genres and the perceived limitations of being an all-female singing group.
“A big part of what got us to this point was the group’s willingness to try anything,” Materetsky says. “To commit to weird things.”
Pitch, Please! happened upon Sacred Harp singing by way of a Spotify algorithm. Davies, in the midst of an electronica kick, was bowled over by “Frontier” when it came up for her as a recommended track.
“The way we decide on competition songs is to create a [shared] playlist, and anyone can put songs on they think are cool,” she says. “I threw it on for fun and it stuck.”
She and Materetsky sent it to the group’s arranger, who notates songs into an a cappella group structure.
“He was like ‘Guys, this is Sacred Harp singing. You have to lean into this.’ Then we kind of ran with it,” Davies says.
To introduce the idea, they took the group on a surprise field trip during a fall rehearsal. The singers piled into cars and drove out to the Church of the Redeemer in Newton, Massachusetts, where the Norumbega Harmony choir sings Sacred Harp on Mondays. Pitch members listened, then tried it for themselves.
“There’s this giant book of hymns and a caller who will be like, ‘OK, we’re doing No. 300,’” Cohen says. “Everybody flips to that book and sight reads all together, the same words but different notes. Our minds were all blown because we’d never sung in a style like that before. It was so amazing. I think back to that every time we do the set.”
Materetsky notes that a cappella group singers can be overly detail-oriented and precise, which Sacred Harp is not.
“Whatever comes out comes out. Hard cutoffs don’t matter, grace notes don’t matter. The hard part was getting people to just let it rip. So it was a really good exercise, putting the group in a space with strangers and forcing them out of their comfort zone.”
Incorporating Sacred Harp — which also required singers to learn a different notational style — is typical of how Pitch tends to challenge its members, who come from a broad array of musical backgrounds. Materetsky competed nationally with her high school a cappella group. Leto, who sang in all-state choirs as a decorated high soprano, credits the group with tapping into a whole new dimension of what her voice could do.
“It opened me up to a new way of singing,” says Leto, a fifth-year environmental sciences major and soloist this season. “I’m a power belter, so I can sing really loud, but it’s not what I did in choir.”
Davies, a second-year student studying electrical engineering and music technology, was also a choir kid; a cappella has helped her home in on her style as a solo singer.
“It’s really accelerated my vocal abilities,” she says. “My range is a lot wider, and I have a broader understanding of my voice and different techniques.”
Still, the group’s success hinges on the ability of 18 members (16 for competitions) to produce something greater than the sum of its parts. In auditioning new members “what we look for, first and foremost, is the ability to blend and have control over your voice,” Materetsky says. “No [one person] is going to be naturally as bright and nasally as we are in Sacred Harp, and nobody’s going to be naturally as dark as we get in ‘You are my Sunshine.’ You have to understand your instrument and morph it to the people who are singing with you.”
That cohesive ideal lends itself to the story Pitch is trying to put onstage. Their competition set consists of three songs evoking fear and chaos in different ways (“Radio” is about a dream of a terrorist attack,”) leading into a calming lullaby familiar to everyone.
“It’s a statement about the chaos happening right now — whatever that means — and finding the light by looking inward and to your community for love and support,” she says. “Pushing through and doing your thing.”
For the group, that “thing” involves stretching the perceived confines of what a cappella, and particularly all-female groups, can do.
“It’s always a big conversation in this space,” Materetsky notes. “I think it’s safe to say that we’ve played a part in helping equalize treble groups, all-male groups and coed groups, as have a number of other treble groups across the country.”
Technology shifts have enabled that expansion, she points out. Coed groups naturally have a broader range than single-sex ones; men can’t go as high; women can’t go as low. But in recent years, handheld microphones have become more standard, and individual mics can be octavized up or down to make the full range of the human voice accessible to everyone.
“There’s literally no discrepancy between Bethany, our bass, and someone in an all-guy group,” Materetsky says.
It’s an enriching aid to what Pitch, Please! has aimed for since its founding 12 years ago, put together to accommodate the outsize proportion of women auditioning for coed ensembles on campus, she adds.
“It’s cheesy to say it, but we’re always trying to cross boundaries. The founding members, their sound was different, but their hunger was the same.”