The Yale Glee Club Blog

Our beloved 2011-2012 manager, Abigail Droge '12, writes about our performance of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms with the YSO: From Classical to Neoclassical – as Rachel Glodo ’12 reminded us in her brilliant and witty pre-concert pep talk, within two weeks the Glee Club has embraced both Mozart and Stravinsky.  And what a wonderful journey it has been.  Of all the pieces that I have sung with the Glee Club, the Symphony of Psalms is perhaps the one that transformed the most for me over the course of the year. When we first began rehearsals, it was difficult to find my notes amongst the dissonance.  But as we became more and more familiar with the piece, and especially when we were able to hear it with the orchestra, I came to appreciate its beauty and emotion on a different level.  The desperation of the opening movement, a setting of Psalm 38 (“Hear my prayer, O Lord … For I am a stranger with Thee”) only increases the monumental power of Psalm 40 in the...

The concert we'd all been looking forward to since September finally arrived last weekend. We performed the Requiem in Woolsey Hall with a wonderful orchestra of professional musicians, and soloists from the Glee Club. Although we only had a few weeks to practice the chromatic runs in the fugues, debate the contributions of Levin and Sussmayr, agonize over the beauty of the dissonances in the Confutatis, and learn to "call upon deep wells of personal frustration" while singing the Dies Irae, we savored every minute we were able to sing this masterpiece in German Latin. Rachel Protacio '15 writes about her experience: Mozart.  So much tradition, so much excitement, so much wishing we could sing it again.  For me, Glee Clubbers intrinsically represent a wide range of perspectives when it comes to music, and yet Mozart’s Requiem almost immediately captivated us all, bringing us on a gleefully shared journey of twists and turns, bashings of Süssmayr, a myriad of first...