John Walters

Imagine yourself an ardent fan of your college's basketball team, a squad that happens to be among the nation's best. You are so passionate, in fact, that you decided to form a team of your own modeled after them. You approach the coach for assistance, which he provides.

Then, within half a decade your newfangled team is the one cutting down the championship nets.

Such is the case in Provo, Utah, where Brigham Young University has produced the past two Intercollegiate Championship of A Cappella (ICCA) victors. In 2006 the nine-member, all-male a cappella group Vocal Point, which was founded in 1991, won the ICCA for the first time. Last year, Noteworthy, a nine-member all-female a cappella unit that was formed in 2004, inspired by and modeled after Vocal Point, won the championship in New York City.

"It was kind of a hard blow, I'll admit," says James Stevens, the musical director of Vocal Point and a faculty member at BYU's School of Music. "One of the reasons was because our members had done so much to help Noteworthy get started."

One of Stevens' own students, Catherine Papworth, was the musical director for Noteworthy last year when they dethroned Vocal Point as national champions. That can't help your grade, can it?

"We're proud of their success," says Stevens, himself a former Vocal Point vocalist. "But we're competitive, too."

A Noteworthy moment
In the autumn of 2003, Esther Yoder, a BYU student and Vocal Point groupie, enlisted the aid of Dave Brown, a baritone with Vocal Point. Then a junior just returned from a two-year LDS mission in Spain, Brown approached this next mission with similar devotion.

"If there was anything I'd learned from Bob Ahlander, one of the Vocal Point co-founders," says Brown, "it's that you'd have to take it seriously or you were doomed."

Brown and another Vocal Point member, Dan Dunn, sat down with Yoder and created a charter of sorts. "We literally put together contracts for people to sign," says Brown. "It included everything from the types of songs they would sing to the penalty for missing a rehearsal."

Sixty women arrived at the first audition in the winter of 2004. An a cappella group was formed. In March of 2004, Vocal Point advanced to the ICCA West regional semifinal at Stanford. Five members of the nascent Noteworthy troupe road-tripped from Provo to Palo Alto to cheer them on.

Brown, a Bay Area native whose parents hosted the Noteworthy pilgrims, recalls that weekend vividly.

"Divisi, an all-female group from the University of Oregon, also competed," Brown says. "They were very impressive. Very impressive. Our girls just sat there with their jaws open. This is what they wanted to become."

The following autumn, Noteworthy, under the musical direction of Brown, now a senior and still a full-time member of Vocal Point, began rehearsing in earnest. To even have conjured that Noteworthy might be a threat to their big brothers would have been, at the time, blasphemous.

"I wouldn't say that anyone in their right mind thought Noteworthy was better than Vocal Point," says Brown. "All the Noteworthy girls were still going to Vocal Point shows and sitting up front, screaming their lungs out."

Vocal Point was on a different plateau, after all. Three years after the a cappella group's inception in 1991, BYU's School of Music folded them into its program. Though Vocal Point is entirely self-funded, the school provides a business manager, musical director (Stevens) and rehearsal space. Members even earn a college credit each semester.

Noteworthy, on the other hand?

"We scrounged for rehearsal space at the fine arts building," recalls Brown, now in his third year of law school at the University of Virginia. "Esther would arrive early to 'study' and stake out a classroom for us. They still have to scrounge for rehearsal space."