A new a cappella group is forming and is hoping to perform soon.
As its namesake would suggest, The Picardy Thirds is looking to go from having a minor presence to a major one.
The new 18-member, coed a cappella group has the same name as the musical term, which describes a progression or piece that starts in a minor key and ends in a major key.
“We’re a relaxed, fun a cappella group,” Mattie d’Erneville, a senior studying music therapy, said. “We just want to sing together and have fun. We’re not trying to compete or impress anyone. At least this year, it’s just us getting our name out there.”
In the spring, d’Erneville, president of the group, said she contacted others who had an interest in starting a new coed group and thought the musical term would be an interesting name.
At the time, there were two all-male groups, two all-female groups and one coed a cappella group.
Jules Coleman, a senior studying English and Spanish, said The Picardy Thirds filled the gap, especially with a “campus as large and as musical as Ohio University.”
"We needed another, or at least, there was room for another (group)," Coleman said.
After auditions Sept. 12, d’Erneville said the group includes mostly freshmen and sophomores and students from all different majors. The Picardy Thirds has started rehearsing, and she added it has already learned its first piece.
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The group is trying to establish how the members relate to each other, Coleman said, and how serious they want to be about the group.
“Organization and finding our identity is a lot of what we’re doing right now,” Coleman, the treasurer of the group, said.
Rhys Ivan, a sophomore studying music therapy, said the group has moved past introductions and is working on different arrangements, some of which are arranged by individuals in the group.
“It’s about a little more than just the music for us because we have very distinct, quirky personalities and we all get along very well,” he said. “We jive as a group and that makes the music mean so much more to us and hopefully to audiences.”
The group tends to focus on pop music — similar to most a cappella groups — but Coleman said it is willing to do some songs from musicals and TV shows if good adaptations can be obtained.
“If you do too much weird, eclectic stuff, no one's going to want to come to your shows because they won’t recognize anything,” Coleman said. “But at the same time, there is a lot of opportunity to branch out from just regular, hear-it-every-day-on-the-radio pop music and find the occasional song where you’re like, 'This is amazing. We need to do this for the musical quality and sprinkle it in with the rest.' ”
Forming the group initially proved to be difficult, Ivan said, because no one knew about The Picardy Thirds. Ivan said he hopes that will change when the group begins performing.
Ivan said breaking down the music and targeting the difficult spots will be an important part of improving.
It’s also important to get the name known and to be able to start doing gigs with a solid sound, Coleman said.
“Hopefully when you say 'I’m in The Picardy Thirds' to someone, they’ll say ‘Oh, that new a cappella group? That’s awesome,’ ” Coleman said.
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