<p>Their second album is brilliant. If you have some really good headphones, check out this beautiful original song they wrote-no beat box, just 5 beautiful harmonies. On my Dr. Dre Beats headphones, you hear every nuance. </p>
<p>You’ll probably need to pause a while to let it buffer so you don’t get interruptions.</p>
<p>I spent the better part of an afternoon catching up with them. Do you realize they have had almost 200 MILLION hits to their YouTube videos? That’s crazy. Some personal favorites: Appearance on Sesame Street, Evolution of Beyonce (Beyonce posted it to her Facebook a mere 3 hours after they posted it), Evolution of Music, Cover of Lourde’s Royal, Cover of Daft Punk, and any number of other covers. They are really amazing performers. Most everything they’ve done can be found on YouTube.</p>
<p>I also loved their return performance on the Sing Off. Who knew Avi could sing higher than the lowest ranges? </p>
<p>Anyone else following them? They are from my home town, and a very music oriented high school friend of mine had never heard of them, which I found to be pretty remarkable.</p>
<p>Also, in my Youtube searches, I found this performance of Scott, Kirstie, and Mitch at a Martin High School Choir Concert. I wonder if everyone there had a sense that this was talent above and beyond normal.</p>
<p>In college years, DS had the good luck of playing (on a few occasions, sometimes on the street) with one of the band members (K.O.) who attended the same college with him (even in the same year.) I believe he was the newest member.</p>
<p>Do you know that he had performed at Carnegie Hall twice before he attended college?! But he was playing the (classical) instruments chosen by his parents back in his high school years. He also mastered a foreign language in two years in college even though he had not learned that language at all before that. At one time, in a music competition promoted by Yo-Yo Ma, he composed and performed an original music piece in just 2 or 3 days (including the recording) and got a second place in that competition. He was not even a music major. But his classical music capability was at the conservatory level back in the high school and early college years.</p>
<p>When DS once said he valued the EC activities the most in college, he really meant it.</p>
<p>mcat2, I believe you are referring to Kevin Olusola. He went to high school at Andover Prep, then went on to Yale, where he did graduate. I had read about how he mastered Mandarin Chinese after only spending a year in China. He is a brilliant individual and a really talented beatboxer and musician. He also actually has a lovely singing voice.</p>
<p>I think DS also took (music) classes with another student, Kurt Hugo Schneider who produced a lot of music video for Sam Tsui (who were more into musical at that time) in college. None of them were music major.</p>
<p>They all had a good time making music. It is almost as if their favorite EC is their main life. (Many of them are good students in academics though, e.g., maintaining 3.9+ GPA for at least two of them.)</p>
<p>I heard many of them (not referring to other/original Pentatonix members here - who I do not know much about) were actually “trained” in the church when they were very young. Also, it seems most of them are sort of good at several music instruments. (e.g., almost all instruments DS is playing today are what he has learned starting the end of high school and college.)</p>
<p>My son also knew Kevin Olusola at Yale, and he is an amazing individual. He is a superb cello player, and he was on From the Top in high school–playing the saxophone. My son also says he’s a really nice guy.</p>
<p>My son just played for me the Frozen music 3 of the group have on Youtube. Funny and wonderful at the same time. We just found out about their concert tour, but every single place withing 3 hours of us is sold out .</p>
<p>At the risk of seeming obsessed with Pentatonix (I am, partly because they are from my home town), I was wandering around youtube and found this video of a 14 year old Scott singing “Georgia” and sounding like the prodigy I guess he really was. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Someone needs to get them into a Broadway musical. It would sell tickets and give them a little more career sustainability. And I gather that’s what Scott, Kirstie, and Mitch wanted to do before fate turned them into The Manhattan Transfer 2.0.</p></li>
<li><p>I love how much they seem to be enjoying their good fortune, and how generous Scott Hoying is with reflecting some of the attention he gets onto other talented friends.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>One of their youtube videos is a medley of songs from the musical Frozen. It was done in a light hearted, humorous way. In this video, Kirstie sounds exactly like a Broadway singer. I know that before she dropped out of college to do the Sing-Off, she was a musical theater major. She could easily do this-she could do voice work for Disney-type film musicals, too. I agree that they could all do well in musical theater.</p>
Composer/conductor Rob Kapilow dissects a Pentatonix song to show why he thinks they are brilliant. In the first part he talks about the original song and how they’ve made subtle changes, then he plays Pentatonix and points out the amazing results as they happen.
Neat! My daughter worked closely with and performed with Rob Kapilow around the country for a couple of years when she was younger. He is very entertaining!
I just loved that. I wouldn’t have been able to verbalize all the reasons why that song just seemed unique. To have a composer articulate the genius behind the sound was really amazing.
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