Ravinia 2019, Issue 6, Week 12

an academic background. That’s why I always thought I’d do something in medicine.” Nevertheless, the Yale student began fusing his classical training with a decidedly modern musical skill—beat- boxing. He started a YouTube channel for fun, and one of his videos went viral: “Julie-O,” his own unique take on a piece composed by the Turtle Island Quartet cellist Mark Summer. Meanwhile, three of the Pentatonix members had been heading toward their destiny together. Baritone Scott Hoy- ing, soprano Kirstin Maldonado, and tenor Mitch Grassi were schoolmates in Arlington, TX, singing together in choir and musical theater. (They’re very close in age, although Grassi was one grade behind Hoying and Maldonado.) While in high school, they made a small splash with their version of the Lady Gaga–Be- yoncé hit “Tele- phone.” Then Hoying went to USC, where he met one Ben Bram—a musician and arranger who was working on The Sing-Off . Bram encouraged the trio to audition for the show, but he advised ex- panding. They needed a bass voice and soon found Avi Kaplan to fill that role (he left the group amicably in 2017, to be replaced by Matt Sallee). But Bram was looking for one more element to round out the sound: a beatboxer. It was a virtual version of “right place, right time” for Olusola, then known online as the Beatbox Cellist. “When they saw that [‘Julie-O’] vid- eo,” he recalls, “they had already gone through five or six different beatboxers. They decided, ‘That’s the guy we need!’ “They tried to contact me in vari- ous ways, like through Facebook,” he continues. “Ben Bram called me; I hung up on him. I didn’t think it was real. I’ll never forget it. He said, ‘I’m Ben Bram from Sing-Off . We’re thinking of adding you to the TV show.’ I was like, ‘Okay, thanks,’ and I hung up. “Eventually I got a message from Scott. To be honest, I decided to do it [audition with them] only because I thought it would help my medical-school application. I did not think this was going to be a career. Straight up!” So, two weeks after he graduated from Yale, Olusola flew out to LA to meet the other future members of Pen- tatonix, just one day before their TV au- dition. “And then, the rest is history: We actually made the TV show; we won the TV show,” he says. “It started to become a career. I was confused about why I was here, but now I absolutely love it. I’m so thankful I get to do this on a daily basis.” The Sing-Off title came with a $200,000 check and a Sony recording contract. The latter prize quickly evaporated, but the real reward from the show was the potential springboard to ongoing 22 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 12 – AUGUST 25, 2019