The Beatles stopped touring in 1966. One reason: their music was becoming too complex to perform live. Or so they thought. The Vernaculars, a student ensemble from Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina, will perform all of the Beatles' "Abbey Road" album live at the Hard Rock Cafe New York in Times Square on Saturday, March 5. Free and open to the public, the show begins at 9:00 p.m.
The Vernaculars is the flagship ensemble of Catawba's degree concentration in music business. One of only about a dozen American colleges and universities with a curriculum specifically designed for students of popular music, Catawba has become home to a growing number of talented performers and songwriters.
Over the past five years, five Catawba students have placed 1st, 2nd or 3rd in the national John Lennon Songwriting Scholarship Competition. It is a far a better result than any other school in a contest that receives thousands of entries each year.
"In Tune Monthly" recently named Catawba a Best Music School for 2011 in an annual article on top colleges and universities. This is the fourth year the magazine has listed Catawba alongside such established institutions as Julliard, Eastman, Peabody, and Berklee.
Rare among college ensembles, the Catawba College Vernaculars are dedicated to the performance of contemporary popular music.
"Abbey Road" stands as one of the greatest rock albums of all time. It is a complex and stylistically wide-ranging work that features such hard rocking numbers as Lennon and McCartney's "Come Together" and "I Want You" as well as George Harrison's "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun."
"Abbey Road" concludes with a 16-minute medley of songs that begins with "You Never Give Me Your Money" and ends, appropriately, with "The End."
A kickoff celebration for an endowment campaign to fund a Catawba music scholarship in honor of the late singer/songwriter Harry Chapin will be precede the "Abbey Road" performance. It will begin at 8:00 p.m. and is also free and open to the public.
En route to their New York City performance, the Vernaculars will offer a 7 p.m. performance on Thursday, March 3 at Guilford Tech Community College in High Point, N.C., which is free and open to the public. They will also offer a closed and private performance on Friday, March 4 at chARTer~TECH High School in Somers Point, N.J.
For more information about the "Abbey Road" concert or about popular music at Catawba College, contact Dr. David Lee Fish at (704) 637-4280 or dlfish@catawba.edu.
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Vernaculars Perform at Hard Rock Cafe Times Square
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- Harry Chapin Scholarship ;
- Vernaculars ;
- Music Business / Popular Music Concentration ;
- Music at Catawba
