Worldly a cappella group bridges cultures through song

It's almost dinner time. A middle-aged Korean man ushers a racially diverse group of young people into a dimly-lit restaurant in Seoul.

"Before college, they were troublemakers. Today, they are Treblemakers. Please welcome them with a round of applause!" With that cheesy line delivered in somewhat broken English, the college a cappella group walks in, with the 17 members wearing a matching black T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans.

The act's opener is a song that apparently starts out as Ariana Grande's "Focus" but swerves in and out of "Gee" by the South Korean girl group Girls' Generation. A male soloist leads out with the Korean verse, and the female quad backs him with the chorus, "Gee Gee Gee Gee Baby Baby Baby." Audience members, mostly 40- and 50-something Korean men in suits and ties, nod in approval, as if the line rings a bell.

 Afterward, the students go around and introduce themselves, their majors just as diverse as their backgrounds. One of them ticks off his three majors -- voice performance, mathematics and Chinese.

Founded at Northwestern University in 2004, Treblemakers is on its first-ever tour, and being the only East Asian interest a cappella group on campus, they've chosen three Asian cities -- Beijing, Seoul and Hong Kong -- as their first destinations.

"We figured since we're an East Asian interest group, our first tour should be in Asia," Kate Lee, the team's music director and a senior studying voice performance, music education and sociology, said. "Hopefully after this, we'll take national tours and maybe travel to other places, but we really wanted to share music with Asia."

And sharing is what they did in Seoul. At the restaurant on Monday, they performed in front of the local Northwestern alumni association, most of the attendees having graduated from a local college and completed their Master's and Ph.D.'s at the Evanston, Illinois school.

The following day, the group visited Seoul International School in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, to perform and give workshops on the college experience in the U.S. Then, they put on an hour-long show to the general public in downtown Seoul, an event hosted by the government-affiliated Korea Foundation. Before heading to Hong Kong and back to Chicago, they will hold one more performance at Myungduk Foreign Language High School in southwestern Seoul on Wednesday.

Asked if they were familiar with the a cappella scene in Asia, general manager Sam Garcia said besides having performed with two a cappella groups at Peking University in Beijing a few days earlier, their knowledge was limited.

But Treblemakers said resolving the lack of information is what inspired the trip.

"That's one of the purposes of our tour -- to experience how a cappella is part of high school or college communities here in Korea, Beijing or Hong Kong," Kim Young-joon, a tenor and a senior studying economics, said. "We're really excited to find out more about it."

Lee chimed in and stressed that they wanted to stay culturally respectful throughout their journey.

"We see it more as a cultural exchange. We're not trying to bring anything here," she said. "We want to share something and take something back."

Although the trip has allowed them to bridge cultures some 11,000 km away from their scenic campus by Lake Michigan, they have also looked inward to do the same. With members from all over the world, including China, Korea and Singapore, they've taught each other lyrics that may be in one's first language but another's second.

Gina Strohbach, who has never learned Korean but sang "Not Spring, Love or Cherry Blossoms" by the Korean singer-songwriter IU at a fall show, is a case in point.

"We don't assign a song based on, 'Oh, you're the Korean so you'll sing the Korean song,'" Strohbach, the treasurer and a sophomore majoring in anthropology, said. "That's one of the things I really like. It's more like the attitude that everyone is gonna learn the language of the song and we're gonna do a wide variety of languages."

Musical arrangements have also defied cultural boundaries and genres. Treblemakers said although they might arrange a K-pop song like K-pop, they could also introduce classical elements, like a round, which staggers two voices singing the same melody, to render an entirely different effect.

"Some of the arrangers have arranged their songs to be similar to the original. Some of us have turned it into a completely different song," Kim said. "It's not necessarily what the song is about, but how we arrange it."

Treblemakers is scheduled to perform next at Chinese International School in Hong Kong on Thursday. After spending three days there, they will fly back to Chicago to start the spring quarter. (Yonhap)