Glee Club Performs for High School

By DYLAN JACKAWAY

The Cornell University Glee Club hosted high school students for a day of clinics on Saturday that culminated in a Sage Chapel concert featuring sacred music in a variety of languages and a commissioned piece, “Kanpe La,” by composer Sydney Guillaume.

The Glee Club originally commissioned Guillaume to write the work in 2016. Using a poem written by his father, Gabriel, Guillaume’s work attempts to respond to gun violence, police brutality, oppression and political turmoil in both his native Haiti and the United States. Other pieces in Saturday’s repertoire included Latin and English sacred music.

Rayvon T. J. Moore, assistant professor of music and director of choral studies at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, served as the guest conductor for this performance on invitation from Prof. Joe Lerangis, music, who is also the director of choral music.

“I’ve been working on this music for about a week. I know that some of the other singers have had it for at least a couple of months, to get at least some of the notes and rhythms learned in preparation for this exciting day,” Moore said. “I was just actually telling all of the musicians that the best thing about clinicking and working with choirs and being a guest is that you’re collaborating with folks that you don’t know, and your common language is the music.”

Four of the concert’s pieces also featured visiting high school singers from New York City participating in the New York Lower Voices Sing program. Moore also served as the guest clinician for this event, working with the Glee Club and the visiting high schoolers as if they were one large choir.

Jason Ling ’23, this year’s Glee Club president, said he enjoyed working with the outreach program.

“I always like NYLVS. The purpose of it is to be this outreach program and to encourage tenors and basses — who largely identify as men — to continue singing in high school and later on in their life, because for some reason there’s a big dropoff once people start college,” Ling said.

Ling also promoted the club’s upcoming events, including Empowerment through Music on March 4 and a collaboration with the Cornell Symphony Orchestra to perform Mozart’s Requiem on April 29.

Hired as a tenure-track professor in September, Lerangis emphasized the effect that music can have on musicians and audience members alike.

“Our audiences are essentially our biggest stakeholders, in that people come into a performance like this to be moved and to think something different or to feel something different,” Lerangis said.” “That’s all that we can really hope to provide, [which] is a moving performance — something that makes somebody take pause in their day and connect with each other.”

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Leeds said. “Normally he was a long haired hippie freak Deadhead and smelled like a fireplace most of the time.”

Over winter break, Mr. Hess went to Jamaica and bought Ms. Leeds a necklace as a souvenir. That Valentine’s Day he cooked her their first meal, and they have been together ever since.

”He lived up on Ridgewood by all the fraternities, and I was in Collegetown, so we would just walk a lot across the whole campus, across the quad and then across the suspension bridge,” Ms. Leeds said. “So we had a whole bunch of romantic dates walking across the suspension bridge.”

After they graduated, they continued to spend a lot of time together on the Ithaca campus, hanging out frequently in Tjaden Hall. When Ms. Leeds found out she was pregnant on Valentine’s Day, the couple decided to name their son after their favorite hall.

”When our son told us he was going to Cornell, we jokingly said, ‘Well, you’re going to meet the love of your life at age 19.’ And he thought we were insane,” Ms. Leeds said. “Then he did. So now he and his partner live in Austin, Texas, after meeting when they were 19 at Cornell.”

Lynah Faithful-ly Wed

Margo Bittner ’80 and Jim Bittner ’80 met on one of their first days of freshman year, while sitting around the lounge of U-Hall 1 getting to know the new students in their dormitory. The first time they officially spent time together was on a double date to a Harry Chapin concert — but they weren’t paired with each other.

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