Barkan and 19 others were chosen by McFerrin - on the basis of tapes they submitted - to participate in his intensive five-day session called “Dynamic Singing.” All 20 have consequently made the first cut in auditions for McFerrin’s soon-to-be-formed singing group, “Voicestra.” This Sunday, Barkan and 15 others from McFerrin’s master class will perform in a concert of “(Almost Totally) Unaccompanied Voices” at 8 p.m. in the Front Room of the Campus Center at Amherst College. They’ll also sing live on WFCR (88.5 FM) on Saturday.

Barkan, who now lives in Whately, and whose name and presence is well-known in the local folk music circuit, says she did not even see the write-up for the Omega course until the morning of June 1, which was the deadline for submitting a tape. “It was something I wanted desperately to do; some other friends had taken workshops with Bobby and said it was a wonderful experience,” Barkan says.

Luckily she got a one-day extension from Omega, and once she got the tape in the overnight mail and crossed her fingers, everything seemed to go her way. About two weeks later, Barkan got a phone call saying she’d been accepted. 

It wasn’t until she arrived at Omega that Barkan learned she had been among over 250 applicants to McFerrin’s workshop.

“At that point, I thought, ‘This has to be a mistake - I’m just a folk singer,’” Barkan recalls. But “we were just mirror images of each other,” she says of the other participants; “we couldn’t believe we were there. ...we felt very honored and lucky. We had such respect for this man. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing there, but we wanted to be there.”

The other workshop participants (14 women and five men) had very diverse backgrounds, Barkan says, and included a women who runs a theater in Toronto; a lawyer; a voice teacher from Arizona; an actress; a percussionist who sings in a top-40 band; a jazz singer who sings in the Boston clubs; and several people who sing in the New York City nightclub circuit.

McFerrin, Barkan points out, wasn’t looking for any one specific type of singer - that is, not a jazz, pop, opera or folk singer per se. “He was just looking for voices, and for people who were willing to take risks and experiment.”

At the first class, the students sat in a circle on the floor, Barkan says, and “when Bobby McFerrin walked in, we all got really nervous and hoped we wouldn’t have to sing!
 

“It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life, except get on an airplane,” Barkan says. “It was really, really hard.” But she says McFerrin, who did the exercise first to illustrate what he wanted the students to do, was also nervous.

“...the way Bobby put it, in concert, what he does first is the free-form improv. It’s the hardest thing to do, and it’s just like wearing your heart on your sleeve. You make yourself completely vulnerable, you take the biggest risk that you can, and the audience is on your side - they’re gonna love it. So we did the same thing in the class, and he said that would be the hardest part, and after that, it was going to be fun and play.”

But, Barkan says, “it wasn’t just fun and play; for me, every single minute in there was really hard work.” Participating in Bobby McFerrin’s [workshop] was “uplifting” and challenging for Barkan, who typically sings traditional Scottish and American folk music.

“But,” she says “ you’re a storyteller when you’re a traditional singer and that doesn’t change just because you go and do a workshop with Bobby McFerrin. It simply gets refired in many ways ...”

“Being a folk singer wasn’t [an obstacle] like I thought it would be,” Barkan says. “I’ve always sung songs that other people write - I know the words before I even open my mouth. But the most important thing to me is to tell a story - how can I do that with no words? How can I do that with just syllables? It was really different.”

Throughout the workshop, Barkan says, “we experimented with various dynamics, with images and ideas. In describing dynamics, instead of just saying ‘Get louder here, and then get quickly softer,’ Bobby would say, ‘it’s the kind of a sound like a skateboard coming up on the edge of a curb and then just falling back again. ... it’s the dynamics inside every note which shapes them ... not so much technical directions as they are philosophical directions ... creating a vision and a shape.”

During the five-day workshop the group became very close. “We were all taking vocal risks, doing things we never had done before,” Barkan says. And McFerrin, she adds, was “a honey, very sweet.” and extremely accessible. His attitude, she says, was one which assured “I’m here with you guys, I know this is hard.”

“He was,” Barkan says,”very able to keep us inspired and keep us growing ... that kind of inspiration was very precious.”