We can’t cover LBCC’s Got Talent without talking about Melodie Barnett. In fact, we can’t really talk about music at the school in general, without Melodie Barnett.
Between winning 2nd place for her singing skills, while simultaneously running sound and lights, she had a busy night.
Barnett talked with The Commuter about singing opportunities at the school and an amazing trip to South Korea.
Well, originally I wasn’t part of the planning for the talent show.
I run the Formal House Party here at the campus, which is the a cappella group.
I’m also the assistant to Eminent Campo for the music department. So I’m always here doing music stuff.
On the day that they were doing auditions for the talent show, I showed up just so that I could recruit more people for the a cappella group. We got five new people.
And they told me that they were not set up for any sound or lights.
And then they convinced me to audition on the same day. It was a lot of people who knew me kind of forced me going, you should go sing for them.
So I’m like, you know what, I’ll do sound and lights and also perform.
I was like, oh my God, what am I supposed to do with the sound? What am I supposed to do with the lights? And so I decided to make it easy on myself and designate certain acts with certain lighting. Or depending on the mood of the song for our singers, I had two set lighting for singers and then one set lighting for guitarists. And then a few fun ones for special acts, like the dog.
I had set up with the dotted background, so it looked like patterns of a dog. Then I think for the proposal, because there was a proposal before intermission, I put it with a star background.
Then once I saw that he was getting ready to go on his knee, the lights would go back and forth almost in anticipation.
A lot of people, the planning people knew that was coming.
For my accompaniment (was) my friend Hunter (Steele) because he’s also part of choir and the a cappella group with me and he plays guitar.
Tell me about the different singing options at LBCC.
Now that I’m leading the Formal House Party. For the last few years I felt that we weren’t having enough fun. I think we were taking things a little too seriously. And it made it a little harder for us to enjoy things.
I’ve added a few fun warm-ups. So we’re doing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” but it’s where everyone says one word and holds that word as we’re moving on through our phrases. And so we get this crunchy chord. But if we can listen to each other, it stays a really pretty dissonance in there.
Music is pretty much open to anyone. You don’t have to be part of the music program to just go and sing in the choir.
Concert choir, it’s open, it’s non-audition. So if (you) want to join choir, it’s just one credit.
Same thing with Formal House Party. You do have to audition, but you don’t have to be a music major to be part of that.
It’s a smaller group. You don’t have to take credits for it. And then technically you don’t have to be a music major to be part of the group. We do a lot of pop songs.
And then we also go to ICCA (International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella) every year.
So it’s a little looser, smaller, more fun.
What was the group trip to South Korea like?
(Last year) we went to Korea. That was amazing. We had so much fun. We were there for a week and a half, I think.
We came in (to) Seoul from the plane, but then we took a bus ride all the way to Busan, which fun little fact, our bus ride was only supposed to be like three, four hours. It ended up being like six to eight because there’s a big bridge, because Seoul is like an island. So, you have to take this big highway bridge. A cargo truck, it’s whole cargo came out onto the highway. So, they were cleaning that mess and it took several hours.
Then we had a lot of days where we got to go and explore because the anthropology students also came with us.
So we did a lot of sightseeing. There was a lot of characters like, the little prince, if you’ve ever seen the book. They have a lot of statues of him sitting with his fox. It’s such a pretty spot because it’s like a caved in area and so all the houses are built within. And where we were, we were pretty high, so we could see down below.
And then after that we went to a temple. And we’re monks for a day and that was crazy.
There was a competition. So we had to do, it was almost like hard yoga.
It was a lot of movement and kid you not, everyone was going against each other of how long they could stand doing all the exercise. Not me though. I tapped out.
Our director, Raymond, our pianist, Ali, and a few of our guides and a few of our students as well, all were going like, I can go longer than this person. And so you just see them doing all the crazy…like it was a version of burpees that you had to go down, up and do I think some weird clap thing and go back down constantly. And the guy who led that did over a hundred.
I was like, nope, I can only do three.
We all did the big rock climbing, which was also really crazy. I almost fell.
But, once you got up there, you could see the carved in statue and the view from there is so pretty.
There was so much music everywhere. We even got to go see one of their highest choirs in Korea as well. They did one of our popular old musical songs. It was “Old Man River.” And they had this really cool bass singer.
So both that trip and the upcoming performance this Summer in New York are really extraordinary to me. Why do you think a small school like LBCC gets to take cool trips like that?
Raymond (Ocampo). Strictly Raymond.
He knows a lot of people and also he’s always involved. And because of him, we are now accredited by NASM (National Association of Schools of Music).
I was convinced by a friend of mine that I’ve known since high school that I should start going back to college. Like, Craig Hella Johnson is going to be here this term. You have to come start now. I’m like, okay, because Craig Hella Johnson is such a big name for music, for choir. And he was even nominated this year for a Grammy.
We got to work with him. He came, we did a few of his pieces and I got to talk to him. Because at that point I was already training to be the next assistant for Raymond. And so I was tasked to keep him company for one day while Raymond had to go get us lunches.
It was really cool to chat with him about stuff. Because he’s a composer. He also directs pieces as well.
He said, just keep on going and be creative.
