AN IVY LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
THE TIMES
London
Monday July 2, 2001
Yale University is celebrating its tercentenary, and the world is jolly well going to hear about it. “Hear” being the operative word. To celebrate its 300 years, 300 singers have embarked on a triumphal progress through Europe. All are Yale graduates, and most former members of the university’s 140 year old Glee Club or its equally renowned a cappella group, the Whiffenpoofs.
This massive chorus—supported by 150 spouses, offspring, lovers, and camp followers—hit Russia last week. And since its members tend to wear natty blazers and big white hats even when sightseeing, they created a minor sensation on the drab streets of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Especially when the blazers burst spontaneously (but in perfect harmony) into a rendition of some venerable Yale football song, the text of which must have been completely impenetrable even to English-speaking Russians.
Now it is Britain’s turn to marvel. Tomorrow this “Yale Alumni Chorus” sings at the Eisteddfod in Llangollen. On Wednesday—Independence Day—it parades through Wrexham. Why Wrexham? Because that’s where Elihu Yale, the university’s founder, is buried. The spectacle of 300 Americans crowding into a graveyard to sing to a tombstone will be one of the more surreal happenings in Wales this year.
After that, the monster choir comes to London. In St. Paul’s Cathedral on Friday it will mix joyous choruses by Handel, Verdi, and Parry with music by composers with a Yale connection. They include Hindemith (who fled from Nazi Germany to become Yale’s music professor) and the president of the Glee Club in 1913—one Cole Porter, whose tunes have been woven into an exuberant medley for this tour.
And to add some visual élan to the occasion, the university’s ceremonial mace will be flown over from Connecticut, along with 30 college banners and many of its professors. Mace, flags, and eggheads—all will parade under Wren’s dome. Very American, but also very splendid.
So too, is the massive logistical operation behind this tour. It is costing well over £1 million. The chorus members themselves are stumping up several thousand dollars each for the privilege of representing the old university one more time. Donations have also come from other Yale old boys; Paul Newman, who studied drama at Yale in 1950, has chipped in $10,000.
No fewer than three planes have been chartered to carry the singers, their families and their hats across Europe. And the task of bringing together these singers for preliminary rehearsals—when they are now scattered across 33 American states and seven countries—required planning of military precision.
But what is most impressive about this chorus is not its organisational or fund-raising prowess, nor even its vocal power, but the remarkably diverse and high-powered array of people it contains. By definition Yale graduates are bright. But when I caught up with the chorus in St. Petersburg last week, I found myself mingling with scientists and academics, senators and diplomats, a Nobel prizewinner and an astronaut. President Bush’s cousin, Wall Street bankers, psychiatrists, priests, writers, artists, architects—and what seemed like most of America’s top legal eagles.
This is their second great expedition. They went to China in 1998, and another epic trip, possibly to Africa, is planned for 2004. So what is it about the choral tradition at Yale that exerts such a hold—even on those who passed through the place in the 1940s and are now tin their eighties?
“Anyone who has sung in the Glee Club feels a part of a family,” says Rita Helfand, an epidemiologist now grappling with measles and HIV in the Third World. “What the group created was so much greater than what any one individual could do. After you graduate, however, you feel that this is something you can never recreate—that you have moved on in life. So a trip like this is a fantastic opportunity to recapture that spirit. People really do act like kids again. But we also strive to be ambassadors of song, corny though that sounds.”
Mark Dollhopf, who studied theology and philosophy at Yale in the 1970s and now raises funds for non-profit organisations, is the man who dreamt up the idea of an alumni chorus. “I think the university was skeptical about our China tour,” he says. “They were probably worried about a bunch of loose cannons out there representing Yale. This time they are right behind us.”
The Yale Song Book—a collection of college songs, glees, and spirituals originally written for male voices and then discreetly rearranged for mixed choirs when the university went co-ed in 1969—is renowned throughout the choral world. Indeed, when I was at Cambridge in the 1970s, it was the staple diet of many a post-prandial singsong round the old spinet. And in the 1930s and 1940s the Yale Glee Club set standards for the rest of America. But what has happened to Yale’s singing tradition today?
“It’s stronger than ever,” asserts Dollhopf. “We estimate that nearly half of all present-day undergraduates sing. Besides the Glee Club and the Whiffenpoofs there are more than 20 other choirs. I would say that Yale undergraduate culture is largely based on singing.”
That is a remarkable claim, but entirely credible. In St. Petersburg’s Maryinsky Theatre I watched these 300 singers, spanning a 60-year age range, slotting into the discipline of choral singing as if they had been rehearsing together all their lives. Even the surly indifference of the Maryinsky Orchestra—which accompanied the American visitors with a sloppy gracelessness that did scant justice either to the occasion or its own reputation—did not dampen the singers’ spirits. They will probably blow the dome off St. Paul’s.
And then, for some of them, it will be back to running the country. Good to know that the USA is in such cultured hands.
Richard Morrison