It is almost 4 p.m. on an autumn afternoon — a month before the Trenton Children’s Chorus’ two public concerts in Trenton and a private one at the governor’s mansion in Princeton.
The pressure is on, but all is routine.
Several dozen Trenton-area children — ranging from kindergarten to eighth grade — fill study tables, finish homework, and chat. Volunteer tutors are on hand to help. So are a few high school students who have part-time jobs to monitor and assist the younger students when they arrive at the hall below Covenant Presbyterian Church on Parkway Avenue in Trenton. This is where the chorus operations are centered.
The Trenton Children’s Chorus (TCC) — a combination of after school and music program — offers rehearsal, music theory, drumming, tutoring, homework help, and social mentoring to children in the greater Trenton area.
Student participation comes through a couple of avenues. Parents and guardians of children in grades K to 4 can apply to enter children into the preparatory choir or choral readiness program. While those students can automatically move into the more advanced groups, students in grades five and above need to audition. Tuition to the program is nominal, $250 per year is quoted as something on the high side, and there is a sliding scale based on need. Coordinators say that no child is ever denied participation because of limited finances.
Some families are taking notice. “This job got bigger and bigger,” says chorus director Patricia Thel. “When I came on, there were 60 students.” Six years later there are 140 students ranging from kindergarten to 12th grade.
Musician Eric Thompson enters the hall. A performer, Ewing school teacher, and recipient of a Ewing Public Education Foundation award, Thompson is dressed in jacket and tie and lets dreadlocks dance as he walks. He nods, says a few words, and then sits on a drum.
Thompson provides drumming sessions and training on world percussion instruments. So it is fitting that he drops his hand and slowly begins a rhythm. As if following a mute choreographer, the children close books, put papers away, tidy up, and move en masse toward the musician. He turns the drums to one of the students, who continues the passage of rhythms and then stops, silently announcing that it is 4 p.m. and time to rehearse.
This routine is rooted in a 1989 outreach project of Nassau Presbyterian Church. Choir director Sue Ellen Page and Trenton Music School founder Marcia Wood began the chorus as a volunteer-run organization with 11 children in its first year. “It is my understanding that one of the reasons that TCC was formed was because of the cancellation of music programs in the Trenton schools,” says Thel.
Today the program runs through a combination of paid and volunteer staff, and the group has been racking up performance credits: United Nations and National Cathedral, the inaugurations of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and United States Representative Rush Holt, and private and public engagements. They have also shared the stage with jazz artists Bobby McFerrin and Dave Brubeck and appeared this year in the Princeton Festival’s production of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.”
Thel says that the TCC has benefited from a three-year $150,000 capacity building grant from the Trenton Funders Collaborative — Princeton Area Community Foundation, the Bunbury Company, Mary Owen Borden Foundation, and Harbourton Foundation. “Funding has enabled us to put into place a more effective staff structure, the necessary systems to effectively sustain the program long-term, and to provide training for board members and staff. As enrollment has increased we’ve added choirs and hired conductors and accompanists for to staff those choirs. We’ve expanded services to better address our members’ academic needs, such as in-house SAT prep for high school students. As this special funding comes to an end, we need major gifts and an overall increase in individual donations to sustain our growth and to fuel us as we move forward. Replacing those funds will be quite a challenge,” Thel says.
A few minutes after 4 p.m. Thel gets the kids to raise their hands and start intoning notes. The artistic director of the chorus as well as the director and founder of the Westminster Conservatory Children’s Choir Program, Thel then leads the eyes of the group to a blackboard that bears the staff and notes of an ancient song. She counts and signals for the group to follow. In moments a song created several hundred years before Trenton was settled fills the air.
Thel is no stranger to music. Years ago she directed the children’s choir at Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia, and sang in the Atlanta Symphony Chorus under the direction of famed choir director Robert Shaw. She has also worked with contemporary composers to premiere new works.
She came to the region when her husband joined the law faculty at Fordham University. In the Princeton region, she taught at Princeton Day School and as an adjunct instructor in the music education department at Westminster.
“As a child, I learned good habits through music, and through choral music developed a love of poetry and good writing. Something transcendent can happen in music performances,” she says.
The large group now breaks into units and heads to different rooms in the building to practice. Upstairs in the multi-windowed common room the intermediate choir — a unit for 6th and 8th graders that involves music theory, multi-part singing, and score reading — meets in a semi-circle of chairs around a spinet piano. Here conductor Magdalena Delgado makes it clear that the singers have work to accomplish between tonight and their December concerts and dives into practicing a French noel, “Il Est Ne, Le Divin Enfan” (It is Born, the Divine Child).
“We’re going to pull every vowel coming out of our mouth like it’s a piece of spaghetti coming out,” says the music instructor and member of the Westminster Symphonic Choir who has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kimmel Center, and has sung with the New York Philharmonic. She imitates that action as she exaggeratedly enunciates Ve, Va, Vaho, Vu. “I want to hear more resonating,” she says before changing the over-pronounced vowels sounds to words of affirmation: “III-looove-tooo-siiing.”
Across the hall, Constance Hurtt and accompanist Jared Slaymaker are in the chapel with a dozen members of the training choir. A retired Trenton Public School music teacher, Hurtt is practiced on keeping students in one of the two section of training choir (4th and 5th graders) on task. “Let’s try it! Breath!” she says as the students tackle a song on the December concert programs. As they sing, “Little Star, Holy Star, How you sparkle and grow,” the afternoon sun outside the windows is fading fast.
Down the hall in the church’s nave, Susan Gaylord — a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music’s opera study program and a vocal instructor for Lawrenceville and Pennington schools — leads the other training chorus unit. Ten students crowd the first pew, near the piano where Gaylord plays and then hops up to clarify a point. “Put the ‘B’ on the top of the beat,” she tells them, referring to a specific word at a specific point. The students attack the line and nail the rhythm and sound. Gaylord smiles and compliments them.
“There’s been a 100 percent high school graduation and college entrance from the kids in the program,” Thel says about the program and its effect. She gives her thoughts about the group’s success: “Musicians seem to stay out of trouble. That seems like just a positive side effect, but it’s a very big thing. I also see that people who sing in choirs learn about how to form community. Think of the difference between making contact with people through Facebook and singing with them.
“But the thing that is the most fun to see is the world that opens up to students through music. They learn a musical language, can access a body of literature that they would not be able to access without training, sing in other languages and in the process learn about other cultures, connect to poetry and philosophy, and can sometimes have the same kind of euphoria that you might reach after a good run. When they are able to perform in great venues, all of that benefit seems to quadruple.”
It is now 5:30 p.m., and Thel and the high school students have replaced the younger students in the main church. This is the unit that works to master choral literature and give professional performances. With regionally known pianist Jo-Ann Rubay Sciarrotta providing accompaniment, Thel intones a note. The students — wearing everything from skirts and blouses to hoodies and leather jackets — respond with commitment and engagement.
She then gets serious and, thinking of the concerts to come, says, “Now it is time to really work.” They take out “Carol of the Bells” and begin.
While routine, something deeper is going on. Something reflected in a statement by one of the students on the chorus’ website: “Being a chorister for nine years was much more than singing in the choir. Often choir practice was the highlight of my week because, there, I felt a sense of belonging. I’ve always been quiet and reserved, but TCC helped me to grow out of that shell and has had a tremendous effect on my life. Trenton does not always provide many opportunities for young people, but through TCC, I was able to experience and view a world that had been closed off to me.”
Suddenly Thel stops the sing and gives the group an idea to help the singing be more bell-like. “I’ve devoted my life to singing vowels. But don’t sing them now. Just go to the ‘Ding!’”
It’s her way of telling them to go for the gold.
Trenton Children’s Choir, Covenant Presbyterian Church, 471 Parkway Avenue, Trenton, Sunday, December 7, “Lessons and Carols,”4 p.m., and Friday, December 12, Winter Concert, 7 p.m. Admission: Good Will Offering.
Upcoming: Friday, February 6, Black History Month Concert. 6:30 p.m. and Friday, March 27, 7 p.m., Covenant Presbyterian Church, Trenton. Saturday, March 28, 25th Anniversary Concert, 7 p.m., Miller Chapel, Princeton Theological Seminary. Sunday, April 12, “Spring into Song,” Central Baptist Church, Ewing. Friday, May 15, Spring Concert, 7 p.m. Covenant Presbyterian Church.
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