The American Boychoir wowed the Reynolds audience Friday night with its a capella harmonies.
The American Boychoir is a program for the American Boychoir School—a music boarding school located in Princeton, N.J.
The choir is composed of boys in grades four through eight, from across the United States.
According to the American Boychoir website (www.americanboychoir.org), its mission statement is “to sustain and move forward with a distinctively American voice the one-thousand-year-old boychoir school tradition” and also to “combine the training program for mastery of choral music with a superior academic program in order to create a profoundly integrative educational experience which emphasizes creativity and such traditional values as self-discipline, self-reliance, hard work, teamwork and dedication to long-term goals.”
There are four objectives added to its school:
To build character in young boys and prepare them for good citizenship.
To provide an exceptional training program for musically talented boys, regardless of their religion, social background or financial circumstances.
To make this unique opportunity the motivation for general educational attainment.
To help enrich the cultural life of the nation and to produce a musical organization that is recognized throughout the country as the finest of its kind.
The choir tours around the United States for performances including Reynolds Performance Hall on Friday.
With a packed audience in the auditorium, phones turned silent and four rows of risers for the choir to stand on the stage, the concert began with a performance of the third song from “Songs Eternity”—“Sing Creations Music On.” From that point, the performances were split into certain sections—“Songs of Faith,” “Songs of the World,” “Songs with the Central Arkansas Children’s Choir,” “Songs of Peace and Freedom,” “Songs of Love” and “I Hear America Singing.” With each section came about three to five songs that fit into the title of the section—the American Boychoir sang a few songs with the Central Arkansas Children’s Choir, and songs such as “Stars and Stripes Forever” were performed in the “I Hear America Singing” section.
There were parts of the concert in which the choir would perform certain theatrics to make a song seem more exciting—this was especially true in its performance of “South African Medley” in the “Songs of the World” portion, right before the intermission.
Audience members left the auditorium smiling and seemed far from disappointed. The American Boychoir’s next performance will be March 28, at the Verizon Hall Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, Pa. Tickets can be purchased on its website.
