A&E
Hamiltion College Choir Tour: a tradition of student bonding
By Dominic Veconi ’15
April 10, 2015
For some Hamilton students, Spring Break starts with a trip home, a restful first day, a morning of sleeping in. For others, Spring Break starts with an adventure, like Alternative Spring Break. For the Hamilton College Choir, the first day of the break is spent on two buses. And the second. And the third. And the whole first week, really.
Each night, the Choir and the College Hill Singers—an elite subset of the Choir—give a concert at a different venue for the annual choir tour, a week that everyone in Choir looks forward to during the year.
The tour begins and ends at Hamilton, making a large circuit through a particular region of the country, or overseas once every four years. The region of the tour cycles every four years, so that every class year in choir has the chance to experience each area. Each region of the tour is different, so no two years of tour are the same; you really never know what it will be like singing from one year to the next.
The tour is pretty consistent: at around 8 most mornings, we get on the buses with all of our luggage, drive to a concert venue in the town we are staying at, perform our concert, and then go to our lodging that night. Some students go home with Hamilton alumni, parents, friends or city locals volunteering their homes; whoever cannot get placed in a homestay goes to a hotel. Several of the choir members who end up in a hotel will often go out to a bar if they are over 21, exploring the city with friends. Meanwhile those students living in homestays get to talk with residents of the hosting city, and often come back with funny stories about their homestay and hosts.
The hosts of choir tour homestays invite anywhere between two and seven members to stay in their home one night, have some small breakfast available for us the next morning, and help us get to the buses on time as we leave the city for our next concert. I think that most choir members are pretty low-maintenance at their homestays, but it is no exaggeration to say that our tour would not be possible without the generosity of our homestay hosts. Parents are generally excited to meet their kids’ choir friends, and often they make for especially friendly hosts.
After we get to a tour venue, usually a church, we sing two sets of songs with the College Hill Singers and one or two barbershop quartets between our sets. The first set is usually religious music from different centuries and composers; this year we sang two different settings of the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, a piece written for three different choirs, and a setting of E. E. Cummings’ “I Thank You God” composed by Eric Whitacre. The College Hill Singers go on next to sing a selection of chamber pieces, which this year included a heart-warming arrangement of Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes.”
This year, a barbershop quartet made us laugh with a ballad about covering up flirting with someone other than your significant other, explaining hastily that “Why, she’s a cousin of mine!” Then the choir returns full to sing our second set, which consists of mostly secular songs, ranging from renaissance madrigals to American gospel. Some songs are well-known to our audiences; most musicians are familiar with the works of Eric Whitacre, for example. These are some of the most powerful moments, when we get to share our music with people who already have a connection with these pieces. Some say that music has the capacity to transcend all social, racial, economic, religious and ethnic boundaries when it speaks to its listeners, its players, its singers. This is never more clear than during choir tour.
At the end of every concert, we sing “Carissima,” the alma mater of Hamilton College, which almost every choir upperclassmen has memorized by their junior year. One can hardly miss a few seniors getting teary-eyed as they sing our college’s song for one of their last times during our concerts on tour, reflecting on how exciting it is to share our music with others, to see new cities, to represent Hamilton College and to spend time with people who have helped shape our Hamilton experience.