A member of the Harvard Choruses
Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum | Radcliffe Choral Society | Harvard Glee Club
Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum | Radcliffe Choral Society | Harvard Glee Club
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Letters to Alumni (August 2023)
Letter from Andrew Clark, Director of Choral Activities
Dear Alumni of the Harvard Holden Choruses:
Greetings from Cambridge! I write to you as we prepare for the upcoming 2023-2024 season having experienced our “return to normal” activities last year, including three international tours (HGC to the Dominican Republic, RCS to South Korea, and Collegium to Sweden!). We emerged from pandemic restrictions with the largest audition turnout of my time at Harvard, performances in Sanders as well as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, the establishment of a new professional choir in residence, Ensemble Veritas, and the continuation of our work advancing disability justice through Cambridge Common Voices, who recently sang the national anthem at the largest Fenway Park turnout in four years for a Red Sox game.
Our groups also bid a bittersweet farewell to choral staff members who provided exemplary leadership, teaching, artistry and, most importantly, continuity during the COVID-choral era. Dr. Nathan Reiff, Resident Conductor of the Harvard Glee Club since 2017, accepted a faculty appointment at Swarthmore College as their new Director of Choral Activities. Meg Weckworth, RCS Resident Conductor and Administrative Manager for Choral Music, left after nine wonderful years to take on an exciting new leadership position at the Kennedy School. Finally, Collegium Resident Conductor Jonathan Mott concluded his five-year tenure with us and will begin his doctoral work at the Eastman School of Music, where he’ll also serve on the choral faculty of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. I’m so proud of these colleagues and grateful for their support and collegiality, especially during the pandemic times.
I’m writing to share that these simultaneous departures have enabled us to reevaluate the staffing needs of the choral program and to consider an ideal structure of positions to best serve the groups. With that in mind, we are currently conducting two searches: 1) a full-time Administrative Manager for Choral Music; and 2) a full-time Associate Director of Choral Activities.
The Administrator Position had previously been half-time during Meg’s term, but a program of our size and scope needs more operational support to help all of us do our best work. Last year, I also taught as an interim choral conductor at MIT and worked with a full-time administrator. This made such a difference in allowing me to be a better teacher and conductor. More importantly, the decade-long integration of our choruses into the curriculum requires us to think more strategically about incorporating nonprofit leadership and student empowerment as an element of our pedagogy, just as we do with preparing and performing great music. Our student leaders deserve and require mentorship from professional experts to equip them with the skills and knowledge to independently lead their groups. Our new Administrator will serve as a teacher and facilitator as well as a key partner in developing the future vision of the choral program.
The full-time Associate DCA position returns us to a previous model that served the choruses well from 1978-2010. This conductor will start in July 2024 and their primary responsibility will be to lead RCS. Though I love and cherish my experiences with the RCS community, it’s important for them to have a conductor with special expertise in working with treble voice ensembles and ideally an artistic leader who shares a gender identity with most of the group. I will still be able to make music with RCS on combined projects and other events, but look forward to focusing my work on the other ensembles and my courses. The Associate DCA will work from time to time with Collegium and HGC, conduct combined orchestral projects, and have a strong voice in curating our concert projects, tours, commissions, etc. I’m looking for an equal partner to dream big with together. It’s also very important that Harvard fairly compensate our staff and I had been growing more and more uncomfortable with our past model of employing part-time folks (many of whom were devoting full-time effort). Having three full time staff going to work for the Choruses is a dream come true for me. The Associate DCA candidates will be auditioning this fall and we will have representatives from our current groups and foundations participate in our search committee.
Enjoy the rest of your summers! Hope to see you at a future concert event soon.
My best,
Andy
PS: check out www.singatharvard.com to stay informed about our upcoming projects, webcasts, and 2024 tours!
Letter from Madison Webb and Damla Yesil, Collegium's President and Manager
Dear Collegium Alumni,
We write to you as President and Manager of the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum for this upcoming term. Looking back at all Collegium has accomplished this past year, we are incredibly grateful for the experiences that have shaped us into the musicians and people we are today. This past year, Collegium got to work on the powerful To Repair with Tesfa Wondemagegnehu and bring our work on the pieces to Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York City. We then traveled to Sweden at the end of the term for our summer tour, where we sang with Kongero—an accomplished folk a cappella group that taught us beautiful Swedish tunes we plan to bring to Sanders Theatre for our fall concert.
At the end of our summer tour, we had to say goodbye to Jonathan Mott, Resident Conductor of our chorus, who has been an inspiration to us for years. Jon was everything Collegium needed, an ambitious yet compassionate conductor, and an extra hand that was always there for Andy. With his departure, along with other choral conductors, we support the staff decision of adding a full-time Choral Administrator for choral music along with a full-time Associate Director of Choral Activities. We believe that the individuals who will take these positions will play a crucial role in getting us situated without the departing staff members of the choral program, giving Andy assistance when needed without the presence of Jon, and avoiding student burnout for students who would take on larger concert management tasks during exam periods.
Damla, Manager of Collegium, along with the two other student managers of the Harvard Choruses, has helped Andy in serving on the search committee to select the ideal candidate for this Administrator position. The new staff leader will begin in the fall and we are ecstatic about welcoming whomever gets the position to our community, even more so because we are confident that they will help us work at our most efficient abilities.
In the 2023-2024 academic year, we look forward to more new beginnings. At the end of August, we’ll be welcoming Lorraine Fitzmaurice as our Resident Conductor and Teaching Assistant for the next year. Lorraine sang in the undergraduate choruses at Cornell University and trained in Zurich, Switzerland, earning her Master’s Degree at the Hochschule der Künste. We’ll also be welcoming Beck Saine, a recent Harvard College and Collegium grad, as interim Choral Administrator until we select a full-time administrator. Following Jon’s departure, we can’t wait to involve Lorraine and Beck in our upcoming plans.
Additionally, we are kicking off auditions during the evening of the first-year convocation. We look forward to welcoming the Class of 2027 as we prepare for our annual fall retreat in October and concert in November. During our fall retreat, we’ll learn and rehearse two new commissions by Caroline Shaw and Joshua Shank, in addition to bonding through being outdoors and fun choral traditions.
Our fall concert will premiere Shaw’s work entitled “The Side Road,” and Shank’s work entitled “Undelivered,” which will honor the 60th anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy ‘40 and his undelivered speech that he was to have given on the day he died. We’ll also perform works from Johannes Brahms, Joseph P. Webster, Craig Hella Johnson, William Byrd, and a selection we learned during our time in Sweden.
In the spring, Andy will be on sabbatical, so we’re looking forward to welcoming Dr. Noah Horn as our visiting lecturer and conductor! Leading up to our spring concert, we have also been brainstorming service-learning opportunities for Collegium students through Education Through Music, a nonprofit that provides funding for music education in under-resourced schools throughout Boston.
We’re excited about this next chapter in Collegium’s journey, and encourage you all to stay in touch if you have any questions or comments about our plans for the year. We hope to see you in Cambridge for one of our concerts very soon. Until then, look out for more updates throughout the year!
Sincerely,
Damla Yesil, Manager | Harvard-Berklee ‘27
Madison Webb, President | Harvard ‘25
More info about the 2023-2024 season