Yale Glee Club Outreach!

Here is a blog post written by one of our co-CEO's (community engagement officers), Alison Levosky, about a recent outreach event that Glee Clubbers took part in. Read below!

About two weeks ago, a few members of the Glee Club had the privilege of traveling to City College Academy of the Arts (CCAA), a secondary school in Manhattan, where they were excited to be able to use their musical experiences to work with some of the students there. Martin Toomajian, who is a Yale alum (JE '06) and directs the glee club and the musical theatre at CCAA, reached out to the Community Engagement Officers of the YGC, Dan Rubins and I. Together, we were able to plan a very meaningful event for all involved.

The day's schedule was full of both fun and serious musical work: Glee Clubbers sang a few Yale songs for the CCAA students, and then the students sang and danced for the Glee Clubbers to show their hard work in preparation for their upcoming musical, Once Upon a Mattress. Then, the YGC members quickly learned the end of the finale of the musical and sang with the students to help them gain confidence for the end of their show. Next, the middle school and high school students broke off into different groups with the different YGC singers, and they had a chance to ask questions about music, or college, or Yale, or anything else they could think of! Finally, the groups came together to sing a combination of the alma maters of Yale and CCAA.

While the schedule sounds busy, it was so much more than a busy day for these Glee Clubbers, who also had a concert at the Yale Club the same night. One of our singers said, "Besides helping the kids with their music, I think our presence was really impactful in the sense that a lot of them expressed a happy surprise that we were personable and excited to talk to them - it seemed to take some of the scariness out of "College" for them, and a lot of what we told them about our own high school and college experiences showed them that they're more ready than they think." This seemed true for all of the groups; the students were so excited to be able to work with the Yale students, hear them sing, and realize that we are not so different from them.

Another singer mentioned the power of music, noting that "it is such a beautiful thing to watch music connect people who barely know each other, but share a love for what seems to be such a basic human experience...and it wasn't just about us teaching them, but it was about them reminding us of the pure joy of participating in music together." And it was true - though the day was fairly short and the friendships were built in only a few hours, it is a day that the Glee Clubbers and the students will be inspired by for many days to come.

In a season of giving gifts, we as the Glee Club would like to express our thankfulness for the music we have to give and to share with our community, and we look forward to more events in which music can strengthen the ties of our community - whether in Manhattan, New Haven, New England, or beyond.

Ten Songs of Yale you didn't know about

Bram Wayman '09 delves into the depths of songbooks past. The views shared here in no way represent the official opinion of the YGC Blog nor the YGC... & c. & c. & c.* Though clear favorites stand the test of time, and the old song books of Yale are full of the high stupidity of yesteryear, a few gems that aren't often — if ever — sung today stand out for me. Some of these songs are beautiful, some hilarious, and some downright offensive, but they all deserve a second look, and I'm not convinced all of them should have fallen out of use. I'm no expert on the history of Yale songs, and have only picked from a few books, but here are ten songs of Yale that still bring a smile to my face. 1. "Old Tom Wilson." TTBB. One of Barty's cleverest arrangements, this piece is a song from the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky. It features vocal banjos, vocal beer-chugging that gets longer each time the jug goes around, lyrics such as "Big fat ga...

SPRING TOUR DAY 1: San Diego

The first stop on our tour was to sunny San Diego! We drove there after a night in LA, stopping on the way to reflect in the breathtaking Self-Realization Fellowship Gardens in Encinitas, and then to sink our toes into the sand for the first time at Coronado Island. Ashby Cogan '14 writes about our first concert of tour: After a couple hours soaking up the sun and ensuring a prosperous quarter for the MooTime Creamery, the Glee Club boarded the buses to the First Presbyterian Church of San Diego for rehearsal and joint concert with the Whiffenpoofs. We speedily rehearsed our program, which included many pieces we had not sung in a while. Among them, terrifyingly, was a 24-part canon we had not performed since December. With fewer than fifteen minutes to review it we ironed out our missed entrances and proceeded through the program. Pre-concert energy levels varied—personally I felt like the jetlag monster had just scraped me off the bottom of its shoe—but as we got ...

Vuvuzelas @ Harvard

On Friday November 19th, the members of the Yale Glee Club traveled to Cambridge, MA for our annual joint concert with our counterparts from Harvard. The concert is always the day before the big Yale-Harvard football game ("The Game"), so rivalry runs high. During the lead-up to the 2010 Game, there had been much ado about the possibility that both Yale and Harvard fans would be armed with vuvuzelas during the contest (the powerful plastic horns were eventually banned ). During our football medley, we found a way to get in on the fun in B-flat : John Clayton '13 juggles Yale vuvuzelas during "Lord Jeffrey Amherst Douma" The Yale Vuvuzela Consort (Mari Oye '11, Rebecca Trupin '11, Jason Perlman '11, Dylan Morris '11), with a portrait of its spiritual leader YGC alumna Kaley Sullivan '10 gets in on the fun More photo fun from the Harvard Concert: "The saddest tale we have to tell" — YGCers mourning the fact that we have to grad...

Something Auditioning This Way Comes

“Good Morning” from Singing in the Rain is blasting off President Emily Howell’s computer. The door opens. She hits pause. Officers rush to seats in the Glee Club Office, stow half-eaten bagels under chairs, and try to look semi-official and yet not intimidating to freshmen. “Something Auditioning This Way Comes,” says Emily. I can’t shake the feeling I’m in a reality show. There’s one chair in the center of the room. Kids from West Virginia, South Africa, California, Vietnam, and Long Island are coming in one at a time to say hey, shuffle their feet, and talk music at Yale. As a cheat sheet to those of you planning to audition in future who may be reading the Glee Club Blog, I offer a set of possible questions you should study up on. We’ll answer some of them ourselves, as a sneak preview of the new officer bios to be posted Monday. Ahem. Q: If you could build a house out of any unconventional material, what would it be? A: “Ice cream sandwiches. They’re kind of like bricks and woul...

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