Singers Make a Pitch for Perfect Harmony : * Music: Having fun is the primary motivator for Pasadena members of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing.

Last October, 16 members of the Crown City Chorus sang at Robin’s Restaurant on Rosemead Boulevard in Pasadena, as they’ve done several times before.

Outfitted in white shirts, black pants, sleeve garters and straw hats with red bands that matched vests, bow ties and suspenders, all that was missing were handlebar mustaches.

They spoofed, goofed and improvised on tunes from an earlier era, like “Easter Parade,” “Lida Rose,” “I Love a Parade” and “When You Were a Tulip.”

They weren’t serious until the spine-tingling “God Bless America” finale. Few restaurant patrons walked past without smiling.

But the informal, spontaneous style of the Pasadena group, which is a chapter of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America has cost them members.

President Leonard Gold says the chapter, which had 78 members in 1980, is down to just 39 members. The principal reason for the Pasadena chapter’s losses, said Gold, 44, was that younger members wanted to expand the group’s repertoire and be more competitive than the older members, who just wanted to sing for fun.

In the same decade, the society’s total international membership of more than 35,000 dropped too, but by only 385--a much less significant percentage.

The Crown City group occasionally lost members because of chapter mergers and people moving. But the big drop for the group came in 1985, when 18 members left to join the newly formed Foothill Cities chapter in Santa Fe Springs, whose members enter more singing contests.

In the Pasadena chapter, the emphasis is on just plain fun rather than competitive singing and a new repertoire, members said. It’s a difference that mirrors a national trend in the society.

A recent issue of The Harmonizer, the society’s official magazine, noted concern about the preservation of the society. A committee is studying the issue; one possibility is a recommendation that the group switch to a more current repertoire to attract new members.

Paul Laemmle, 49, was one of the members who left the Pasadena group. He’s now president of the Foothill Cities chapter. Laemmle said those who left wanted “to form a chorus of excellence. They were a group of really good singers, all young, from 18 to the late 40s.”

The Masters of Harmony, as the Foothill Cities chapter is known, won the International Chorus Championship in 1990.

“The Pasadena chapter didn’t seem to want to get better,” said Stanley Hugh Brown, 42, who also left. “They just wanted to have a good time.”

Gold, Pasadena chapter president, allowed as how Foothill Cities has “a more professional style. But some people feel it’s too rigid.”

Considered an American art form, barbershop quartets date back to the 18th Century. The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America came into being in 1938 when lawyer Owen Clifton Cash helped organize a songfest of barbershop singers at the Alvin Hotel in Tulsa, Okla. Today, the international, all-male society is headquartered on the shores of Lake Michigan in Kenosha, Wis.

The singers can compete both as quartets and in chorus on three levels: international, division and local chapter. In the San Gabriel Valley, there are chapters in Pomona and San Gabriel as well as Pasadena. The other chapters, though, have been roughly stable over the years. San Gabriel has 35 members; Pomona has 60 members.

The society creates its own four-part arrangements, and members always sing a capella--or without instrumental accompaniment.

Members of the Pasadena chapter particularly like “woodshedding,” in which tenor, baritone and bass voices improvise harmonies around the lead--or melody singer.

“When the chords really hit,” Gold said, “you sound like you’re singing six or seven different parts. The harmony becomes personal.”

The chapter, which charges about $80 annually in dues (half that to members under 21), rehearses weekly and has scheduled its annual concert March 14 at Pasadena Community College.

The chapter choristers sing mainly in churches and schools. For fund-raiser concerts in restaurants, they receive a percentage of the evening’s proceeds and donate profits to the society’s adopted charity, the Institute of Logopedics, a center for speech-impaired children in Wichita, Kan.

For the Pasadena chapter, there’s no immediate remedy for the philosophical split, said Otto Nass Jr., a past president and 39-year member of the Pasadena chapter. Nass, 69, is a retired contractor whose family helped found the chapter in 1946 and whose wife sings with the Sweet Adelines--the society’s unofficial sister chorus.

“Where are the singers?” Nass asked. “Many years ago, people were singing. There were piano bars. Now, people have good voices, but they don’t sing. Maybe it’s due to the songs they’re writing today.”

And to make matters worse, he said, the average age in both the chapter and the Far West Division--which includes California, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii--is over 61. In the Pasadena chapter, 15 of the 39 singers are 60 or older.

On the other hand, six of the members are under 30. Michael Maxwell, 21, a Caltech math student and recent recruit who sang at Robin’s Restaurant in October, admits he had never heard many of the classic ballads in the society’s repertoire. “I can’t get nostalgic about the songs,” he said. “There’s no overlap in my life experience. . . . But learning the music is fun.”

The Fantasy Quartet is a group within the Pasadena chapter who joined last year when all four were students at Mark Keppel High School in Alhambra. “I like the harmony,” said Khuu Sac, 16. Leonardo Lopez, 18, now in college, added, “The singing brings a camaraderie.”

And therein lies the group’s future, members say. “Unless barbershop singing interests young people, the whole thing is going to go down the drain,” Nass said. “But even to people in their 40s, the old songs are the songs the Beatles used to sing.”