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"I've had tons of great experiences with the choir - I've been on trips and made a lot of friends. You learn new things every day." Peter
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"It's good to be involved in a group besides school- it's really fun." Kit
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"It's a lot of work, but we really don't mind it - we enjoy it. It's intense and it's fun - it's intensely fun!" Wilson
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Anyone
interested in auditioning to participate in the Boychoir may
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The Church of the
Redeemer founded the Bryn Mawr Boychoir in 1999 to undertake community
outreach through music. The members of the choir all receive full
scholarships covering the cost of uniforms, local travel, instruction,
voice coaching, and summer camp. The choristers sing 40 to 50 services
and concerts annually at the Redeemer and throughout the community.
Opportunity
Discipline
Dedication
Quality
Practice Schedule
“The news media have paid sporadically excited attention in recent years to what has been dubbed "the Mozart effect," a correlation between musical study and the intellectual development of children. And, indeed, there has been ample documentation of a connection between musical study and the development of spatial awareness, a skill of great importance for the apprehension of mathematics, and later for science and engineering. Research on young music students in Hungary has noted their increased performance in reasoning, comprehension, and memorization compared to their peers in more conventional schools, and has also demonstrated that the music students were habituated to participate more actively in the learning process, answering questions, building on the answers of classmates, and demonstrating better study discipline than in the other schools. Indeed, collaboration is one of the essential skills that music can teach. People often think of musical study as an isolating experience - hours alone at the piano or violin that might have been spent in the company of other children playing games. And it is true that some aspects of musical study do demand solitary concentration. But other avenues of musical experience - playing instrument in ensembles, or, of course, singing in choirs - are inherently group-oriented, and teach the rewards of collaboration, (and the pitfalls of not collaborating) even as they build the musical (and intellectual ) skills of the children participating. Research suggests, too, that all children are created more or less equal in musical terms - that what we blithely call musical "gifts" are available to all children, if only they are cultivated and encouraged. As with the study of languages, that encouragement and cultivation is most effective when it comes early; it is far easier to teach a six-year old to match a pitch, and thus to "sing in tune" than it is to teach a twelve-year-old (or a thirty year old) who has never tried to develop that skill. Music is indeed a gift - but it is a gift open to all, not rationed out to a select few.” You can, I'm sure, guess what's coming next. not a harangue, but an invitation to all, and particularly to children, to become musically involved... It does mean work - as in most things, the rewards are proportionate to the effort that produces them. But the rewards of regular participation in music…will not only be some hope of results from " the Mozart effect" years down the road, but an increased sense of connection, week-in, week-out, to our worship, to this community , and to the God who gives us music and one another.
Why a Boychoir? What
can you tell parents weighing the benefits of this choir for their
son? Why
does the choir take so much time? Why
choose choir over sports or some other activity? At
Guilford Cathedral in England you began a new choir where previously
there had been none. What made families want to become involved? What
are your goals in working with your choirs? * During his long career in cathedral music in England, Dr. Barry Rose founded and directed the choir at Guildford Cathedral, was Master of the Choir at St. Paul's Cathedral for ten years, and then Master of the Music at the Cathedral and Abbey Church of St. Alban. He also served as church music consultant to the BBC for many years. Several of Dr. Rose's recordings have been bestsellers, and he has the unique distinction among church musicians of having been awarded 1 platinum, 3 gold and 2 silver discs for a wide range of recorded repertoire ranging from Mozart and Handel with Kiri te Kanawa to McCartney and Elton John with the composers themselves. Dr. Rose is a frequent guest director of the Bryn Mawr Boychoir and Girlchoir at the Church of the Redeemer.
The Bryn Mawr Boychoir accepts boys entering the third grade through voice change (usually around the eighth grade) who have an interest in teamwork and music and who desire the challenge of being part of a first rate choir. The Bryn Mawr Boychoir gives boys the broadening experience of travel, the pride of being part of a great choir, a sensibility for music and poetry and the self-discipline to become skilled team players. The Bryn Mawr Boychoir admits boys of any race, color, national or ethnic origin. All boys admitted enjoy equal rights, privileges and responsibilities to the programs and activities of the choir. For more information on setting up an audition, please contact Dan Moriarty, Director of Music, at (610) 525-2486 ext 22 or by emailing dan@theredeemer.org click here for Boychoir Application in Adobe Acrobat-PDF format click here for Boychoir Application in MS WORD After completing this form, you may return it either by mail, fax, or as an email attachment. To return it by mail, please print out the form, complete it, and mail to Alexander Davis, Church of the Redeemer Box 1030, Bryn Mawr PA 19010. To fax it, send the completed form to 610-525-8547. To return it as an email attachment, type your responses into the form (MS WORD doc), save the completed form and send as an attachment to dan@theredeemer.org . The Bryn Mawr Boychoir is available for hire to sing at private functions such as weddings, festivals, funerals and other engagements. The Boychoir has a wide repertoire and the Music Director will guide you in appropriate musical selection for all events. Please contact Dan Moriarty for details. Church of the Redeemer
Pennswood and New Gulph Roads
Box 1030
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
(610) 525-2486
Tish Zaleta, Receptionist ext. 10
tish@theredeemer.org
Huw Williams, Director of Music ext. 22
huw@theredeemer.org
Click here to hear a track from the CD
Click here to hear a track from an
upcoming Christmas CD release
A NEW CD featuring the combined Girl and Boy Choirs in concert in Chicago and at The Redeemer.. The recording features a variety of music from Harold Arlen's "Over the Rainbow" to Benjamin Britten's Missa Brevis in D. Listen to a few tracks below.
The CDs of the Boychoir
and Girlchoir are available for purchase. The Boychoir will make their first-ever tour with the Bryn Mawr Girlchoir in June, singing concerts and church services in the Chicago area from June 21 – 27. This will be the Boychoir’s seventh tour. The Chicago schedule includes performances and services at Emmanuel Church, LaGrange, on June 22 St. Peter’s in the Loop, Chicago, June 23 St. Paul and the Redeemer, June 24 St. James Cathedral, Chicago, June 26 St. Luke’s Evanston, Evanston, June 26
Scenes from the June
2005
Past tours include:
June,
2005
Chicago, IL June, 2003 Washington, DC and Arlington Virginia July, 2002 Rochester and Portsmouth, England June, 2001 Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut February, 2001 Atlanta, Georgia September, 2000 New York City and East Hampton, New York Choir summer camp An annual tradition for the Boychoir. Boys meet in late August for a several days of camp to prepare for the fall season. This year’s camp will be a day camp (9 AM – 3pm) held at Redeemer from August 27 – September 1. New choristers are especially encouraged to attend. Rehearsal and Service Schedule Boys grades 3 and
4 (Resident Choir) Boys grades 5 through voice change (Touring Choir)
Tuesdays 6:30 - 7:45
PM A complete schedule is published in the fall. The choirs have a week off after Christmas, a week off in the spring and two weeks off at the family's discretion excepting blackout dates. The season begins the week following Labor Day and runs through late June. Choir camp is for boys in the Touring choir. It is typically held in late August. First year boys entering grades 5 through 8 are strongly encouraged to attend. All expenses including instruction, music summer camp, uniforms, and voice lessons are included with admission to the choir. Tours are not included in the scholarship, although financial aid is available on a needs-basis.
By Michael Caruso There was a time when they formed the only "professional" musicians devoted to "classical" music. They were once the only ensembles upon which great composers lavished the most treasured expressions of their genius. But now, many have fallen on hard times or disappeared altogether. "They" are the boychoirs that once adorned cathedrals and abbeys throughout Europe, the choral ensembles comprised of pre-adolescent boy trebles along with adult men singing alto, tenor, baritone and bass for which masters of sacred music such as Josquin, Palestrina and Bach composed most of their greatest scores. Even well into the middle of the 20th century, choirs of men and boys were the pride of cathedral and parish churches throughout the Christian world. Times and tastes, however, changed in the decades since the 1960s. The abandonment by the Roman Catholic Church of the peerless treasury of its liturgical music in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council resulted in the disbanding of most parish and even cathedral boychoirs, with only the most dedicated choir directors determined to salvage as much of this enduring legacy as possible. It often fell to American Episcopalian churches to preserve this choral tradition within the context of their liturgies, which often retained much of the beauty of language and ritual from the past. One of the few local practitioners of the art of training a boychoir is Dan Moriarty, music director at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr and director of both the Bryn Mawr Boychoir and the Bryn Mawr Girls Choir. Originally from New York State --"back in the Dark Ages," in his own words -- Moriarty came to the Philadelphia area to major in English at Villanova University. As it turned out, this was merely a temporary diversion along the way of his journey to become a professional musician focusing on the organ and choral directing. While still a student at Villanova, Moriarty took organ lessons from John Binsfeld, the longtime organist and choir director at Old Christ Episcopal Church in Society Hill. The early 1990s found him at the Curtis Institute of Music, studying organ with John Weaver, one of the most renowned organ pedagogues and concert artists in the world. Upon his graduation from Curtis in 1995, Moriarty took up the post of associate organist at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in midtown Manhattan, one of Gotham's most architecturally distinctive churches but a parish that, at that time, had seen better days. Part of Moriarty's mission was to found choirs for boys and girls as part of the new rector's determined outreach program intent on reviving the life and prospects of the historic parish. "By the time I left St. Bart's," Moriarty said, " there were 85 kids, both boys and girls, singing in the choirs. The program is still thriving and continues to play an active part in the church's parish life." Moriarty returned to Philadelphia in 1999 when he was invited to perform a similar musical miracle at yet another historic but challenged Episcopal parish, that of the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr. When I asked him why he was willing to leave the Big Apple -- the center of not only the American classical music scene but, along with London, one of the two capitals of that particular community worldwide, his answer was twofold. "Actually, I wanted to get out of the city. It was a very demanding job, just by itself, and it was made all the more exhausting by living in New York City. Plus, Michael Stairs (the well established organist at Redeemer as well as the choral director at the Haverford School and organist for the Philadelphia Orchestra) had always been a great friend and supporter of mine while I was at Curtis. He offered me all the help I would need if I came to Redeemer to work along with him, so I accepted the offer." In time, Moriarty became the parish's director of music, overseeing the activities of the church's mixed choir of adults as well as what became the Bryn Mawr Boychoir. He was also encouraged to launch a concert series that eventually was entitled "Great Concerts for Great Causes" and that raised upwards of $3000 for local charities. Most of these organizations focused their efforts towards the betterment of children's lives, so Moriarty's endeavors brought him into contact with scores of young people. Over the six years of its existence, the Boychoir has garnered an admirable reputation and performs with many of the region's leading ensembles as well as tours nationally and internationally. It recently joined Vox Ama Deus for a performance of J.S. Bach's "St. Matthew Passion." It sang with the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia in Paoli's Daylesford Abbey and the Episcopal Cathedral Church of the Saviour in West Philadelphia. It visited the Czech Republic last summer as part of a festival of choirs of men and boys, sang at the National Episcopal Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and even appeared on television. "The touring and joining other ensembles and being on television are all very important," Moriarty explained, "because they validate all the hard work that goes into being a member of a high quality musical ensemble such as a boychoir." Moriarty acknowledged the difficulty finding new choristers for all choirs but especially to replace those boys whose voices -- perish the thought! -- finally change, obliterating the stratospheric purity of their treble tones and replacing them with the mature resonance of young men's timbres. It's a task made none the easier by the changes in diet that have prodded these hormonal changes to occur sooner than ever before. Moriarty spoke of wishing to be able to staff a boychoir of 20 full members with 8 to 10 in the preparatory training choir. "Basically," he said, "you need to recruit boys in the third grade in order to be able to maintain replacements for the older boys once they mature and their voices change. In this day and age, you have them as members of a boychoir for four or five years, but not much more than that. That's not much time, when you stop and think about it, to accomplish all the training in singing and theory." Moriarty pointed out that most of the boys who consider joining his choir and who come for a tryout session or two end up staying once they realize that the experience isn't one of all work and that there's a great deal of fun involved, too. Learning the music and performing it well often aids immeasurably in building up a boy's self-esteem and social skills. "There's no question about it being a large investment of time," he admitted. The choir rehearses three and sometimes four days a week and sings at the principal Sunday service of the Church of the Redeemer twice a month. Sometimes concerts are scheduled once each month. "But it's not just demanding," he countered. "It's also enjoyable because it's a wonderful social setting for the boys and the kind of musical outlet that enables them to make music with their peers. Plus we tour each summer, usually for about two weeks, and those are always a lot of fun for the boys." While Moriarty readily acknowledged that the formation of the boychoir was one of Redeemer's outreach programs designed to bring in new and more active members, he emphasized that far from all of the boys are members of the parish or even live on the Main Line let alone in Bryn Mawr specifically. "Of course we'd like to think of the choir as a doorway through which entire families might consider becoming Episcopalians if they're not already or, if they are, becoming a member of Redeemer as their parish, but we have many boys who are members of other Episcopal parishes and other denominations. We mean it when we say that all are welcomed in the Bryn Mawr Boychoir." For more information about the Bryn Mawr Boychoir call Dan Moriarty at 610-525-2486, ext. 22, or visit dan@theredeemer.org.
April 19, 2001 By
DAVID ROBINSON
©Main Line Times 2001
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