A Cappella at Carleton!

One of the first ways I found community at Carleton was through joining the Knightingales (otherwise known as the Gales) a cappella group, one of the four a cappella groups on campus. If you love singing with a smaller group of people, getting the chance to belt your heart out in a solo, arranging your own music, and/or eating cookies (more on that later), then a cappella could be the perfect fit for you! 

Here’s how it works: there’s four groups to choose from, including the Gales (all female and nonbinary identifying), the Knights (all tenor and bass voices), Exit 69 (all-gender identifying), and the Accidentals (all soprano and alto voices). All the groups are student-run and each group has a joint concert with one of the other groups every term, as well as one combined concert with all the groups. Each group will have slightly different ways of doing things, so for the rest of this article I will focus on my experience in the Gales! 

One of my favorite parts about the Gales is that we practice in Dacie Moses, Carleton’s “cookie house” that is open to students to both bake and eat baked goods. The rule is that whatever you bake has to stay in the house for other students to enjoy, meaning there is almost always something sweet to eat when you visit. It’s also a no-shoes house, which only adds to the coziness. I love going to Dacie’s after a long day of classes, grabbing a cookie, and singing with my friends! 

Another fun part of the Gales is that, being run by students, we have the freedom to choose which songs we want to sing and create our own arrangements of them. We give our “baby Gales” a rundown of how to arrange music through the free platform MuseScore at the beginning of the year. Generally, if you arrange a song or find an arrangement online, you get first dibs on soloing – but one of my favorite things is when a Gale will arrange a song with another Gale in mind to solo it. We do a lot of solo songs with the rest of the group as background harmonies and percussion, but we also love our group songs (including our Gales theme song!) and singing songs with multiple solos. 

But what about the time commitment, you may ask? I think it’s totally doable to be a Gale and do other activities! We meet about 3 times a week for 1-2 hour rehearsals, meeting about 5 hours total a week. Additionally, our meeting times are arranged around everyone’s schedules so that you can come to rehearsal no matter what you’re involved in. 

As for performances, we have a few each term, including during Family Weekend in the fall and Date Knight in the winter (where you can set up your friends on a blind date and then watch them be awkward together while you sing to them). We love creating themes for our concerts with the other groups, especially if we can get them to rhyme. 

My most favorite part of being a Gale, however, is that we aren’t just a group of singers but a close group of friends. There are about 10-15 of us each year. We’ll often have dinner together before concerts, and we try to plan a few get-togethers throughout the year to hang out (my favorite Gales hang being a random powerpoint presentation night).

This community of singers gave me an immediate place to belong after I auditioned my first week of college, and my time with them has included some of my favorite experiences of college so far. If any of this interests you, find us at the activities fair at the beginning of fall term to sign up for an audition!