We were a little indecisive when it comes to names, taking ideas from magazines, foreign music, and random events. Here is a preserved history from our first two years of the progression that finally led to Ancora.
It began with a song called Hitori (ひとり). It's a pretty good Japanese song by The Gospellers (it's on about half of their CDs). Back in Spring 2005, the early a cappella group tried to perform this song (thanks to our love of Japanese). Unfortunately, the five-part harmony overwhelmed founding members Jordy and Li, both new to singing and attempting parts out of their ranges. "Go" (五) just means five, since there were 5 of us at the time.
As we moved on and began to drop Hitori, the Gospellers released an album called "G10." Of course, the "G" had nothing to do with anything, though there were still 5 of us. At the end of the year, we all tried out for choir, and made it into Cappella, the most advanced choir at our high school. Unfortunately, Li was not able to even try out, due to time taken by band.
With the possible addition of a new member, we had to change our interim name yet again. However, we never got around to doing anything with this group, as we soon...
...dropped one person, almost dropped another, then incorporated one last person. Because of the rapid fluctuations, we temporarily became G-Five-Plus-or-Minus-One. But already the problem is evident -- it's too awkward. So in an attempt to trim it down...
...we moved to the more simple "Plus1." We actually stuck with this for a while, going through our debut song (Stand By Me), home project (I Swear), song on hold (Surfer Girl), and much of our headline song (Bop 'Til You Drop) under this name. Plus1 was not too bad, but in the end it just didn't fit.
For a short period of time, we had no real identity, referred to by Mr. Aron (our awesome choir teacher) as "the Bop boys." We didn't circulate this name much, but we did consider it. Unfortunately, this period of no identity took place during our awesome Choir Debut Concert. We resolved to come up with a better name by the Holiday Concert. "Bop Boys" brought out our fellow singer Victor's classic sigh of "Boy bands."
As we searched for a name, an article came up in the New Scientist magazine. Immediately, several of us wanted to adopt the name "Romantic Rodents," and for a while we were cute, fuzzy ねずみ — carrying our Japanese influence over with the word for "mouse".
Then we found a musical terms dictionary, and looked to Ancora (Italian for encore). With the addition of a random outburst, it almost became the Ancora Conspiracy.
A few days later at our huge music retreat (a flop), our leader, Kevin, wrote a paragraph so badly that he couldn't read his own writing. On a whim, we came up with Illegibles. This seemed to be our current choice at the time, and we kept it as long as we did "Plus1".
Next week, founding member Patrick came up with the great idea of using a rain-related name, based on our domain name at the time (rainstorm.homelinux.net). Our best bet seemed to be "After the Rainstorm", until Jeremy (another founding member) accidently came up with "Break into Storm". The pun on "Break into Song" seemed like a good idea, but we eventually decided that it was too hard to get. We did joke about it probably ending up becoming our CD name.
And it's official! After serious brainstorming, argument, and dissent, we finally chose Ancora as our name. Ancora lasted us all the way through 2005 and into 2006.
In Fall 2006, however, Ancora's future was uncertain, with only three returning members. Although the group did not change its name, there was, for a short while, a second group called Metra4, singing new member Alex's original piano/voice compositions. The group was eventually folded back into Ancora, and unfortunately none of Alex's compositions were ever performed.
Ancora was back, and was here to stay for the rest of 2006 and 2007. The tagline was created by Alex in Spring 2007 and used for our CD title. The group continued to sing both at CHS choir concerts and at performances elsewhere, even returning in Fall 2007 to the CHS Holiday Concert to sing in the lobby — after three of the members had graduated!