Yale Glee Club Hosts 150th B-day Concert; Ted Hearne Performs At Carnegie

The Yale Glee Club celebrates its 150th anniversary with a gala Carnegie Hall concert on Friday, April 8 under the direction of Jeffrey Douma and joined by the Yale Symphony Orchestra. The program includes the New York premiere of TEd Hearne's partition (commissioned by the Glee Club for this occasion), Ralph Vaughan Williams' grand cantata Dona Nobis Pacem, and a selection of a cappella works recently premiered by the Yale Glee Club.

In a century and a half, the Yale Glee Club has grown from a thirteen-voice men's voice ensemble to an eighty-voice mixed choir. Their command of a wide range of repertoire and commitment to commissioning new music has put them at the forefront of the choral world.

What makes the Yale Glee Club special is that students from across many disciplines come together through their love of singing. This diversity is reflected in some of the noteworthy Yale Glee Club alumni, who include composer Cole Porter, actor Vincent Price, Prescott Bush (the father of Presidents George H. and George W. Bush) and theologian-activist William Sloan Coffin.

TEd Hearne's partition will receive its New York premiere at the Carnegie Hall concert, a week after the world premiere in New Haven. A five-movement work for chorus and orchestra, partition is set to writings of Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said and texts compiled by Hearne as he wandered through neighborhoods surrounding Yale. The work is a powerful exploration of the ways people erect artificial and arbitrary barriers between one another. For a copy of the full text to the piece, please e-mail a@alebagartner.com.

Hearne, who grew up singing in choirs and is an alum of the Yale School of Music, is best known for Katrina Ballads. Winner of the 2009 Gaudeamus International Composers Award, Katrina Ballads is an oratorio based on media observations on the hurricane disaster that crippled New Orleans in 2005.

The Yale Glee Club puts a resounding exclamation point on its 150th anniversary year by commemorating its 1928 world tour (its first) with concerts May-June 2011 in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Czech Republic, France, and Turkey.

Complete Yale Glee Club 150th Anniversary program at Carnegie Hall, 4/8/11

TEd HearnE (b. 1982): Partition (Yale Glee Club Premiere, 2011)
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872 - 1958): Dona Nobis Pacem (1936)
Dominick Argento (b. 1927): Dover Beach Revisited (Yale Glee Club Premiere, 2004)
JAMES MACMILLAN (b. 1959): Nemo te condemnavit (Yale Glee Club Premiere, 2005)
MICHAEL GILBERTSON (b.1987): Weep you no more (Yale Glee Club Premiere, 2009)
ROBERT VUICHARD (b. 1986): Zephyr Rounds (Yale Glee Club Premiere, 2007)

BIOS

YALE GLEE CLUB

The Yale Glee Club is steeped in history. From its earliest days as a group of thirteen men from the Class of 1863 to its current incarnation as an eighty-voice chorus of women and men, it has represented the best in collegiate singing for a century and a half. The students who sing in the Yale Glee Club might be majors in music or engineering, English or political science, philosophy or mathematics. They are drawn together by a love of singing and a common understanding that raising one's voice with others to create something beautiful is one of the noblest human pursuits.

The Glee Club's repertoire embraces a broad spectrum of choral music from the 16th century to the present, including Renaissance motets, contemporary choral works, world folk music, and traditional Yale songs. Committed to the creation of new music, the Glee Club presents frequent premieres of newly commissioned works and sponsors an annual competition for young composers. The great choral masterworks are also an important part of the Glee Club's repertoire; recent performances include Verdi Requiem, Orff Carmina Burana, Mozart Requiem, Britten War Requiem, Rossini Stabat Mater, Fauré Requiem, Haydn Missa in Tempore Belli and Creation, Brahms Nänie, Mendelssohn Elijah, Penderecki Credo, Aaron Jay Kernis Symphony of Meditations, and choral symphonies of Mahler and Beethoven.

One of the most traveled choruses in the world, the Yale Glee Club has performed in every major city in the United States and embarked on its first overseas tour in 1928. It has since appeared before enthusiastic audiences throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. In the summer of 2005, the Glee Club made its first trip to Australia and New Zealand. This season, the Glee Club will travel domestically from coast to coast and will retrace the steps of its first European tour (1928) to Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and France, adding a stop to Istanbul. Historically a leading advocate of international choral exchange, the Glee Club has hosted countless guest ensembles at Yale and at New York's Lincoln Center in conjunction with its own International Choral Festivals.

The Yale Glee Club has had only seven directors in its 150-year history, and is currently led by Jeffrey Douma. Previous directors include Marshall Bartholomew (1921-1953), who first brought the group to international prominence and who introduced serious classical music to its repertoire; Fenno Heath (1953-1992), under whose inspired leadership the Glee Club made the transition from male chorus to mixed chorus; and most recently David Connell (1992-2002), whose vision helped carry the best traditions of this ensemble into the twenty-first century. The Glee Club has appeared under the baton of many distinguished guest conductors from Leopold Stokowski to Robert Shaw. Recent collaborations included performances under the direction of Sir David Willcocks, Krzysztof Penderecki, Sir Neville Marriner, Dale Warland, Helmuth Rilling, and Nicholas McGegan. In 2011 the Glee Club will perform with guest conductor Simon Carrington.

JEFFREY DOUMA

Jeffrey Douma became Director of the Yale Glee Club, Yale's principal undergraduate mixed chorus and oldest musical organization, in 2003, and also serves as Associate Professor at the Yale School of Music, where he teaches graduate choral conducting and choral literature.

Douma has appeared as guest conductor with choruses and orchestras on six continents, including the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Orchestra, Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra, Daejeon Philharmonic Choir, Moscow Chamber Orchestra, Windsor Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Solistas de la Habana, and the Symphony Choir of Johannesburg. He also currently serves as Musical Director of the Yale Alumni Chorus, which he has lead on six international tours, and as Choirmaster at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Hartford, CT, where recent and upcoming performances include Handel Messiah with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, Schütz Musikalische Exequien and Bach St. John Passion with baroque orchestra Arcadia Players, and Robert Levin's completion of Mozart Requiem.

Choirs under his direction have performed in Leipzig's Neue Gewandhaus, Dvorak Hall in Prague, St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, Argentina's Teatro Colon, Sydney Town Hall, Avery Fischer Hall and Carnegie Hall, and he has prepared choruses for performances under such eminent conductors as Valery Gergiev, Sir Neville Marriner, Sir David Willcocks, Constantine Orbellian, Dale Warland, Krzysztof Penderecki, Nicholas McGegan, and Helmuth Rilling.

The Yale Glee Club performed the East Coast premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis Symphony of Meditations at the 2009 NCCO National Conference, and he has presented at state, divisional, and national conventions of the ACDA and NCCO. Active with musicians of all ages, Douma served for four years on the conducting faculty at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, America's premier training ground for high school age musicians, conducting the Concert Choir, Women's Choir, and Festival Choir. He frequently serves as clinician for festivals and honor choirs.

An advocate of new music, Douma recently established the Yale Glee Club Emerging Composers Competition and Fenno Heath Award, and has premiered new works by such composers as Dominick Argento, Ned Rorem, Jan Sandström, Rene Clausen, Lee Hoiby, and James Macmillan. He also serves as editor of the Yale Glee Club New Classics Choral Series, published by Boosey & Hawkes. A tenor, Douma has appeared as an ensemble member and frequent soloist with the nation's leading professional choirs, including the Dale Warland Singers, Bella Voce of Chicago, the Oregon Bach Festival Chorus under Helmuth Rilling, and the Robert Shaw Festival Singers.

In the spring of 2003, Douma was one of only two North American conductors invited to compete for the first Eric Ericson Award, an international competition for choral conductors. Prior to his appointment at Yale he taught at Carroll College, where he was Director of Choral Activities, and also served on the conducting faculties of Smith College and St. Cloud State University. He earned a Bachelor of Music Degree from Concordia College, Moorhead, MN, and holds both the Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in Conducting from the University of Michigan.

In all its years, the Yale Glee Club has had only six previous directors: Gustave J. Stoeckel (1861-1873), Thomas G. Shepard (1873-1905), G. Frank Goodale 1889 (1905-1921), Marshall Bartholomew '09 (1921-1953), Fenno F. Heath, Jr. '50 (1953-1992), David H. Connell DMA '91 (1992-2002)

TEd HearnE

TEd Hearne (b. 1982, Chicago) is a dynamic composer, conductor and performer with polyglot sensibilities in new and traditional classical music. As comfortable in operatic and orchestral works as in rock and choral music, Hearne's compositions are socially engaging, exploring the complexity of contemporary experience with visceral power and raw emotional beauty.

His Katrina Ballads, a modern-day oratorio with a primary source libretto, offers a searing portrayal of the media's take on Hurricane Katrina. Katrina Ballads was awarded the 2009 Gaudeamus International Composers Award from Music Center the Netherlands, and the recording, on New Amsterdam Records, was named one of the best classical albums of 2010 by Time Out Chicago and The Washington Post.

Ted's music has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, the Calder Quartet, The Knights, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Transit Ensemble, and New York City Opera; heard at the MATA Festival, Bang on a Can Marathon, Carlsbad Music Festival, and New York City's (le) Poisson Rouge; and commissioned by Chicago's Third Coast Percussion, San Francisco's Volti Choral Arts Laboratory, Charleston's New Music Collective, Newspeak, Huntsville Symphony, Albany Symphony and Ensemble ACJW, among others.

Partition was commissioned by the Yale Glee Club for its 150th Anniversary Gala at Carnegie Hall, with the Yale Symphony Orchestra. Upcoming commissions include works for DITHER Electric Guitar Quartet, Toomai Quintet, and a new work for Ensemble Klang, to be premiered in Utrecht at the Gaudeamus Week 2011. Volti records his unaccompanied choral work Privilege for its next commercial release.

Ted is the artistic director of Yes is a World, resident conductor of Red Light New Music, and was for five years composer-in-residence of the Chicago Children's Choir. He served as music director for the world premiere productions of works by David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Bryan Senti, as well as the American premieres of works by Constantine Koukias and Beat Furrer.

Ted received a 2008 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was an artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony in Fall 2009, and has recently completed collaborations with composer J.G. Thirlwell and renowned filmmaker Bill Morrison.

Ted attended Manhattan School of Music and Yale School of Music, and has studied with Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, David Lang, Nils Vigeland and Julia Wolfe. His work is available exclusively through Good Child Music.