American Midwest Spring Tour 2018: Day 1, Boston to St. Paul

Here it is. My senior year, and my final Harvard Glee Club Spring tour. This year, we are traveling from Minneapolis to Chicago, by way of Winona, MN and Milwaukee, WI. It’s been a long first day, so let’s get into it.

Tour began, as it typically does, with an early morning flight out of Boston. So, at 4:15 AM, all the bleary-eyed, sleep deprived Glee Club singers received their tour booklet (containing pertinent travel details and information about places of interest) and boarded shuttles to Boston Logan.

Tour book cover, designed by Dennis Zhang ’18

That previous sentence brings me much happiness, because for once, every single member of the Glee Club was present and on time. That is a strikingly rare occurrence for the Glee Club, and it seemed to be a fortuitous start to the tour. One unfortunate contributing factor to our timeliness was that a couple of my fellow singers were not able to join us on tour, making this group the smallest group I’ve traveled with in my four years. It is a big change from last year, when I was with the largest group I had traveled with, and I was a bit sad that we would be missing some valued members of the Glee Club for this first leg. However, the loss of more baritones than tenors or basses restored equilibrium between sections that the Glee Club has not experienced in years; later in the day our faithful and fearless conductor Andy Clark likened conducting this well-balanced choir to driving a Rolls Royce or Ferrari.

Once we arrived at the airport, we all made it to the gate and on-board (after navigating some issues regarding tickets and the maximum dimensions of a carry-on bag). The flight to Chicago went smoothly, and I managed to complete a crossword puzzle while on board the plane. Many of the Glee Club members took this as an opportunity to catch up on an abbreviated night of sleep, or finally fall asleep after staying awake through the previous night. After a brief Starbucks visit and a 55 minute flight from Chicago to Minneapolis, we disembarked and met Mike McGaghie, the choral director of Macalester College. He was there to meet us, but also our conductor, resident conductor, and accompanist. They took off to get to the campus early, while the Glee Club hopped on the tour bus for the short ride to the college.

Gleeks disembark at O’Hare Airport

Brief aside about the Minneapolis airport: for some reason, Chinese is the second language printed on most of the signage, though there are few Chinese people as far as I could tell from the small sample of people I saw at the airport.

It was a cloudy day in Minnesota, and although I was later told that much of the snow had melted, there was a solid couple of inches still on the ground. The pale blue light made it difficult to know what time of day it was, and that combined with our abnormally early start to the day actually made it easier for me to enjoy the experience of travel, rather than trying to worry about the work I would have to do during tour to be on track once I got back to campus.

Manager Emeritus Haden Smiley ’19 expresses joy and relief that everyone made it to St. Paul safely

We were dropped off at the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center, where we deposited our bags in the orchestra room, then went to the choir room to have our lunch (Papa John’s Pizza). I can’t draw any deeper connections between those rooms uses and their respective music ensembles, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader. After lunch, we went into the concert hall to begin our afternoon of rehearsing.

Gleeks reposing after a long day of travel

The concert hall, as our conductor put it, has a very “wet” acoustic, which to me meant that it is reverberant, and fairly generous in terms of making the Glee Club sound good. It’s far from cavernous, and I think will make for a welcoming first concert. We ran through our set-list for our concert before being joined by the Macalester Concert Coir.

The Macalester Concert Choir is close to my heart for two reasons. 1) Its conductor Mike McGaghie was a member of the Glee Club and its resident conductor for several years before I arrived at Harvard. He was also in attendance at the Considering Matthew Shepard performance in Spring 2016 and at the performance of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with Emmanuel Music this February. 2) One of my friends from high school choir, Corbin Dodd, is in his fourth year in the Concert Choir, and will be going on his final tour with them. Our joint concert will represent Macalester’s send-off concert, and my first time performing with Corbin since singing with him in Spain.

Michael McGaghie welcomes the Glee Club

Dr. MaGaghie led us through a brief rehearsal of our combined piece, and then we were free to eat delicious pita, hummus, and chicken kabobs while getting to know the members from the other choir. As might be expected, we had a lot of similar interests: performing arts and choir tours, but also abstract mathematics and teaching. We wrapped up the evening after dinner by thanking our hosts with a “Domine,” and then dispersed into our homestays.

The Harvard Glee Club and Macalester Concert Choir rehearse Unclouded Day

Tomorrow: HGC goes to church (the Christian kind), church (the capitalist kind), and church (the music kind).

Written by Curtis Wu ’18, Photography by Rowen VonPlagenhoef ’21, Edited by J. Finley Ong ’21

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