It's good to be an all-male a cappella group.Well, at least it was on Saturday at the Northeast Regional of the International Championships of Collegiate A Cappella, where three all-male ensembles finished in the top three spots.

Brandeis' Starving Artists, winners of their divisional competition on Feb. 19 at Wheaton College, competed at the Regional but failed to advance.

The all-male ensembles that competed finished in the top three spots, with the gentlemen of Boston University's Dear Abbeys advancing to the competition finals at Lincoln Center in New York City on April 30. Those teams beat out three co-ed teams at the competition.

"I am so proud of Starving Artists' performance at the Regionals," Starving Artists' business manager, Ashley Firestone '05, said."The judges seemed to have a preference for the all-male a cappella style, and since we are not all-male, we are as proud as we could be of our performance in our own genre of co-ed a cappella."

Along with the Dear Abbeys, the 12 members of Starving Artists competed against all-male ensembles from Plymouth State University and the University of Connecticut, as well as coed groups from BU, Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"Even though we didn't win, the judges were very complimentary," Nicholas Barasch '06 said. "They liked the choreography, enjoyed the arrangements and really loved the soloists. What the judges' sheets showed is how good all the groups were and close the ranking was at the competition."

Performing The Police's "Message in a Bottle," Dido's "White Flag" and Great Big Sea's "When I Am King," Starving Artists stayed on familiar ground, singing the same songs that earned a first-place finish at the divisional competition.

"We were all extremely impressed with the groups we were competing against," Firestone said. "There was not one group that didn't deserve to be at that level of competition. I hear from friends and alumni who saw [the Dear Abbeys] that they were fantastic and deserve every accolade they received last night."

Starving Artists will travel to the University of Pennsylvania to perform with Off the Beat, considered one of the country's top a cappella ensembles, on April 2. On April 9, Starving Artists perform their show, "X," to mark the 10th anniversary of the group's founding.



Editors' Note: Dan Hirschhorn, a member of Starving Artists, is sports editor of the Justice.