Hills to come alive with all-girl choir
JOHN Tungay is an irrepressible character, a civic-minded fellow with a plummy accent and a ton of chutzpah who started the Drakensberg Boys’ Choir 50 years ago today.
Now the retired choirmaster and publisher Wendy Clarke are planning to start a girls’ choir in the rolling hills of the Midlands above Cedara College of Agriculture, near Howick, in KwaZulu-Natal.
Having rented a facility originally built for Benedictine monks, Tungay and Clarke envisage starting the new school in January with an intake of 30 girls in Grade 7 and 8. They aim to expand tuition to Grade 12 in five years.
Talented musician Tandile Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s granddaughter, is among the first of the staff to be recruited.
Tungay said the school would be associated with the performing arts faculty at London’s Trinity College.
He estimates the initial cost of the school will be about R2-million. It already has a library with 50 000 pieces of music, an organ and a pledge of R800 000.
Clarke said girls’ choir schools were a recent phenomenon — Canterbury Girls’ Choir was inaugurated in 2014 and is one of only a handful around the world.
The school’s motto will be: “Where words fail, let music speak.”
Tungay, who began his working life as a broadcast journalist for the SABC, was the organist and choirmaster at the Congregationalist Church in Durban’s Florida Road.
In the mid-’60s, parents pulling boys out of performances for holidays or sport constantly hobbled Tungay’s promising young Florida Road choir.
So he sold his house in Durban North and embarked on a massively ambitious project: erecting a threestorey building and starting a choir school — on his family’s 310ha farm in the Cathkin Valley of the Drakensberg — based on the concept of Boys’ Town in Italy, which was started for orphans after World War 2.
Tungay recruited his mother, Gwen, a teacher at Durban Preparatory High School, to teach the boys. Their first intake was 20 boys and almost halfway through the first year, on May 1 1966, they laid a commemorative flagstone.
Since 1966 well over 1 000 boys have attended the school and alumni have included the chief tenors of the Berlin, Vienna and London Operas.