The Germantown Friends School Choir will bring its beautiful music to the American South in March 2008 as it visits a number of cities associated with the Civil Rights Movement. 

 

Head of School Richard L. Wade of Germantown remarked of the tour, “the South and all its complexity is an important place for our students to learn and to understand a bit of history…. The tour will give these students an opportunity to see a world that will challenge them and make them think, and make them wonder about themselves and their place in it, and hopefully add to the GFS mission of making a difference in the larger society. I’m looking forward to many stories coming back from this trip about people that they’ve met and opportunities they’ve had.”

 

Choral Director Stephen Kushner commented on the Choir’s repertoire that students are currently learning, noting, “They’ll be carrying inside music that will be sung in Swahili, they will know settings of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems, they’ll know excerpts of the Mozart Requiem. They’ll know a Bulgarian folk song and a Bosnian folk song and some settings of Shakespeare love sonnets and some Hebrew love songs and some Gospel music. Recreating something of beauty every night in extraordinary places packs a tremendous potential for transformation. And it’s that power of that transformation that I think is the heart of this tour.”

 

Keisha Hutchins, who graduated from GFS in 1993 and recently performed at a school benefit, reminisced about her time in the Choir, describing it as “one of the best musical experiences that I have had in my career and it has lasted with me for a very long time.” Hutchins later became the lead singer for the group Vanishing Peoples of the Earth and recently released her solo album Dedicated EP. She told the current students to “prepare for a very fun adventure. This tour is just the beginning of all of the wonderful places that music can take you.”

 

The Germantown Friends School Choir will perform its tour repertoire on April 5 at 8:00 p.m. in the GFS Meetinghouse at 47 West Coulter Street.