That was the first choral concert I’ve ever been to, apart from the combined choir/strings/band concerts at my high school. The first thing I noticed was that they all wore the same outfit, a full-length navy dress with gauzy sleeves. Irrelevant as this may seem, I appreciated this choice greatly. At any performance where there are no costumes, there is almost always a dress code. However, no matter how rigorously everyone follows this dress code, there is always a difference in the end outfit. In a choral performance, where the important entity is the choir as a whole and not the individual singers, the use of a uniform outfit was a very professional choice to make.
The second thing that struck me was how strong the sound was. I’ve really only heard my high school choir before, and while they were musically sound, due to sparseness of numbers and unbalanced parts (two boys to at least seven girls) they often sounded wispy. Which was why I was wondering how substantial the sound of the Women’s Glee Club would be without any male parts to balance out the low range. It turns out they just don’t need any male parts. I’m not surprised, because I know how good their ensemble is, but it was enlightening to realize that even the top vocal range can sound substantial without an equally low range underlying it. This was, of course, due to the fantastic work of the alto section. I only wish they’d been louder or more dramatic so I could have distinguished their parts more precisely; sometimes the sopranos were overpowering, but as I listened I realized that the alto section was providing a beautiful base for the music. Still, the fact that the sopranos were louder was, for the first time, something that didn’t bother me at all—they were wonderful. The concert programme was unique in that it provided the year and majors of all the girls: almost none of the sopranos are music majors, and yet they had such powerful voices. To me didn’t just sound like they’d been training their voices for years (which is probably true), they sounded like they could even have been professional operatic singers.
Midnight Blue, the eight-member a cappella group within the Women’s Glee Club, also performed at the concert. Their segment brought variety to the concert, adding more liveliness to the music as they incorporated popular songs to the performance, and also eliciting laughter from the audience as they performed their parody of “Jessie’s Girl.”
Both groups also added simple choreography to some of their songs. This was the one portion of the concert I had mixed feelings about: it wasn’t always consistent. Given the uniformity of all other aesthetic aspects of the performance (like the dresses), the fact that not everyone was moving their hands in the same way bothered me a little. Of course, this doesn’t mean they were off time—quite the contrary. It was only the preparation for the clap that was different: some girls brought their hands down in between claps while others didn’t, and so on. However, I did ask myself after the performance whether I would have preferred it had they omitted choreography entirely, and I decided that wasn’t what I wanted either. I think the inclusion of the choreography definitely added spice to the concert. One of the songs also had clapping that was deliberately uneven: for the first half of the song, only some of the singers were clapping, and others added in at the end. This is one place where the choreography really worked well, as it did for Midnight Blue’s portion of the concert.
My overall impression was that the singing was reminiscent of a chorus of angels. Since this was solely female voices, and since those are the vocals used in soundtracks whenever sublime experiences need musical accompaniment, that’s the image the concert evoked in my mind. It was beautiful to sit there and listen to their songs charm the audience, especially on a winter day as pristine and sparkling as Saturday was. It was a wonderful way to welcome the first snowfall of the year.
