“Call Me Maybe” Gets a Choral Twist

Definitely not the two people behind the video: Arianne Abela, a music teacher at Notre Dame High School in West Hartford, Connecticut and the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, and Colin Britt, director of music for Marquand Chapel at Yale University and assistant conductor for the Hartford Chorale. The two friends began simply wanting to have fun with music. “Like almost everyone in the country, we were saturated with Carly Rae Jepsen's song all summer,” explained Britt.  It soon dawned on him that with a few tweaks, the song could be transformed into a classical hit. 

A part-time arranger and composer, Britt began playing around with the orchestration of the popular song, while Abela gave the vocal arrangements a classical kick. “We wanted to make it extremely and almost comically classical with exaggerated text and diction and superfluous musical ideas like the sopranos singing up the octave or the tenors sustaining a high G,” said Abela. On Labor Day, the duo invited friends and colleagues to come record a video of a choral/orchestral arrangement of a mystery song. Fortunately, the two already had plenty of experience recording other viral hits, including one tongue-in-cheek video about what choristers commonly hear from their conductors. In the course of an hour and a half, the newly formed “3Penny Chorus and Orchestra” had learned, practiced, and recorded the piece.

What came next included interest from Ryan Seacrest, Perez Hilton, NPR, and the big call from New York, asking Abela and Britt to organize a live performance on the Today Show.  So why all of the interest?  Why does it all work so well?  "It was fun to have our musicians’ training and mature sound offer a twist to this well-known pop song," said Abela. "So in putting together a recording like this, all 30+ singers had to commit fully and to visually communicate the fun spirit of this performance.”

Abela and Britt could not be more overjoyed about the success of their video. “Among many people, there's certainly a mistaken impression that classical music is stuffy and dated, and that it can't speak to younger generations,” said Britt. “While our goal in making the video was purely for purposes of fun, we're thrilled if it managed to convince a handful of people here or there that choral music can be lively, silly, playful, and fun.”

By merging choral music with the most popular song of the year, Abela and Britt have helped millions of people relate to the music they love. And what comes next? “This is the first project we've worked on as the 3Penny Chorus and Orchestra, but we're really hoping it won't be the last,” said Abela.