Join the Harvard Glee Club on their Virtual World Tour!
The Harvard Glee Club has invited us to join them for several weeks on the Italian stops of their virtual world tour. Below is the invitation and description from Dr. Clark.
Please click on the button below to register and receive an email with the Zoom link for the meetings. If you have any questions or problems receiving the link, please email HGCA President, Trey Farmer EDM ‘97, at treyfarmer@gmail.com. If you are unable to attend one of the meetings, don't worry as we will provide a link to the videos on this page after each meeting. We look forward to seeing you at the meetings!
Greetings, Harvard Glee Club Alumni!
As you know, this year’s HGC experience has been unlike any other. I’m proud to report that our students have met the challenges of the pandemic with resilience, ingenuity and, yes, a great deal of good humor and joy. Not only have we managed to adapt our work to an online format, our singers have also leveraged some exciting new opportunities that remote learning presents.
Our annual tours have long been a highlight of each HGC season. While faced with the inability to travel and present live concerts, our students have instead designed a virtual tour. We’ve been exploring music from polyphonic traditions around world, working directly with culture bearers, scholars, and conductors who each visit us over four rehearsal sessions. HGC will be making virtual choir recordings from our destinations and keep our “tour-book” tradition alive through online media documenting our work. Our “tour-stops” include:
Russia – where we traced the evolution of concertized Orthodox liturgical music from Tchaikovsky to Rachmaninoff with renowned conductor, scholar, and publisher Dr. Vladimir Morosan. During our “visit,” Dr. Morosan arranged a setting of “Svete Tihiy” by Pavel Chesnokov as a gift to the Harvard Glee Club.
South Africa – where HGC commissioned a new work by Bongani Magatyana, working directly with the Cape Town-based composer and conductor. We’re learning to sing in Xhosa and exploring the rich traditions of Black South African choral music and its impact on society.
China – where we will immerse ourselves in both traditional music and contemporary works under the tutelage of Dr. Lei Ray Yu, while also experimenting with Mongolian throat singing! Current HGC students have been transcribing Chinese choral works and assisting in our learning.
For our next tour stop, we would love to welcome the entire HGC alumni community to join us on our virtual trip to….
Italy led by HGC alum Dr. Giovanni Cestino, a conductor and musicologist based in Cremona. He will be leading our next four sessions:
Wednesday March 3 | 4:30-5:30p EST
Italian polyphony from XIV to XVI century: genres, forms and performing contexts
We will focus on motets that link with crucial masterpieces in Italian art and architecture, and begin learning “Tenebrae factae sunt” (1544) by Paolo Aretino for a world premiere recording that we invite you to record with us!Monday March 8 | 4:30-5:30p EST
Miserere & Stabat Mater: rethinking notions of tradition and innovation
Dr. Cestino will employ these liturgical texts to link “high” and “low” polyphonies from the Allegri “Miserere” to the Sardinian repertoire for male voices (su cuncordu), blurring the boundaries between art music and folk music.Wednesday March 10 | 4:30-5:30p EST
An Introduction to the Alpini Repertoire
We will explore a multifaceted bundle of folksongs, arrangements, and original pieces that are extremely popular among TTBB choirs in Italy, and deal with the traditional repertoire of the Alpini (the Italian army’s specialist mountain infantry).Wednesday March 17 | 4:30-5:30p EST
Italian 20th-Century and Contemporary Music for TTBB Choirs
Dr. Cestino will offer us a sense of how and why Italian composers chose to write only for male voices, rather than for a mixed choir, and how these choices link with the repertoires that we will examined in the previous three sessions.
We welcome you to join us for all four sessions, though feel free to attend any of these presentations based on your interests and availability as each presentation stands on its own. Each session will be also be recorded and available to those who wish to participate asynchronously. Videos will be posted on this page and the Harvard Glee Club’s YouTube page through April 1st.
Italian Virtual Choir Project: I’ll post a score soon to the Aretino “Tenebrae factae sunt,” the work that we will record together (the first recording ever made of this motet!). The recording will be audio-only. We’ll share more information about this project in the coming weeks.
In Glee,
Andrew Clark
Director of Choral Activities