The Yale Glee Club Blog

The YGC received a rave review of its April 8 performance with the Yale Symphony in Carnegie Hall. Read the full review and the feature story about our concert and reunion weekend that ran as a preview. Some highlights: "exciting, beautifully sung," "powerful," "one of the best collegiate singing ensembles, and one of the most adventurous," "[The Glee Club] is to the television show 'Glee' approximately what the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions are to 'American Idol.'" The YGC Blog would also like to attest that, indeed, our "director, Jeffrey Douma, didn’t settle for an evening of chestnuts." This concert - the sustained high notes in "Nemo", the rhythms of "Partition" - was extremely tricky, some of the most difficult music we've sung. And some of the most beautiful. At Carnegie, the audience came with us every step (and half-step) of the way, from Dominick Argento's...

Adam Fishman '13 on our April 8 performance at Carnegie Hall When I was little, my dad loved telling the same old joke: a lost tourist on 57th street in Manhattan stops Jascha Heifetz on the street and asks him how to get to Carnegie Hall, to which Heifetz replies, “Practice, practice, practice.” At New Years, my mother was talking to her friend whose daughter recently graduated from music school and had just played in Carnegie Hall. This friend had flown out from Chicago to New York to see the concert because well, it’s Carnegie Hall. My mother looked at me with a smile and said, “Well Adam. When you play in Carnegie Hall, I’ll fly out to see it too.” I then said, “Oh! So you’ll be flying out in April?” I had forgotten to tell my parents about the concert, which, to a Midwestern family of musicians, is certainly the most important concert of my life thus far. Whoops. They bought two plane tickets. So how did the Glee Club get to Carnegie Hall? There are several answers to that que...

The Glee Club has visited 59 countries. That's 26.2%, meaning YGC has shared the power of song with over a quarter of the world's countries! Have you been to as many places as the Glee Club? post above courtesy of YGC president Emily Howell '11

For 150 years, the Yale Glee Club has existed as an institution; it is part of Yale University, also part of New Haven, Connecticut. In writing this piece, I wanted to express the questions faced by a YGC singer living in today's New Haven. Is it a divided city? To which community (or communities) is a Yale student responsible? How do these local questions relate to the geopolitical education a student comes to Yale to receive? Does a musician in the Glee Club - or a composer writing for the Glee Club - have the ability to communicate their experience in New Haven through music? I was drawn to a passage from Parallels and Paradoxes, a book of conversations about music and society between Palestinian-American theorist and cultural critic Edward Said and Argentine-Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. This exchange took place in New York in 1996: SAID: One thing that is going around in this country, unfortunately, is a sort of amnesia about the fact that the United States i...

Re-posted from Goings On About Town: Classical Music Yale Glee Club The storied ensemble, led by Jeffrey Douma (and accompanied by the Yale Symphony Orchestra), comes to Carnegie Hall to celebrate its hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. Vaughan Williams’s “Dona Nobis Pacem” is the centerpiece of a program that also features the première of “Partition” by the Yale alumnus Ted Hearne, as well as music by Dominick Argento and James MacMillan. (212-247-7800. April 8 at 7:30.) Date: April 8 Venue: Stern Auditorium—Carnegie Hall Venue Address: Seventh Ave. at 57th St., New York, N.Y. Venue Phone: 212-247-7800 External URL: carnegiehall.org From the archives... publicity in the NYT in 1896:

Exhibit A: Orchestra seats sold for YGC concert in Carnegie Hall (below left). Exhibit B: Totoro (below right). Spotted by stage manager Dylan Morris '11