At 50, women’s chorus still going strong
Anniversary will be celebrated with a special concert
PALO ALTO — Melodious voices, intense and full of whimsy, tickled the halls of Cubberley Community Center in Palo Alto, drowning out the thuds of martial arts practice and squeaks of basketball games nearby.
“Callooh! Callay! O frabjous day!” sang members of the Peninsula Women’s Chorus from a rendition of “Jabberwocky,” inspired by the Lewis Carroll poem.
The all-women chorus was practicing songs one night last week that they will sing on April 30 for their 50th anniversary celebration concert, True North.
For this event, singers, alumnae and audience members are invited home to the chorus’ “true north” in which the group will explore the theme of displacement and homecoming.
The concert will display the chorus’ musical range, from featuring a call-to-action arrangement by Kathleen McGuire, “Harriet Tubman,” to a premiere of a multi-movement piece by Stanford graduate Eric Tuan that weaves together themes of exile affecting Jews to modern-day displacement of those living in Silicon Valley.
“Jabberwocky” is special because it was written for one of the chorus’ founding members, Anne Anderson, 80, who has been singing with the group since 1966. Her family commissioned the piece by Oregon composer Ron Jeffers years ago to celebrate Anderson’s 32nd year with the chorus.
“We are singing it this semester in my honor,” said Anderson, who lives in Palo Alto. “Its upper three parts have a lot of syncopation and my part has a running base that never stops and it’s a killer. It makes me say, ‘Ron, what were you thinking?’”
In many ways, the jazzy, contemporary, hard-tomemorize “Jabberwocky” exemplifies the chorus’ mission to take on new works — often breaking the mold of traditional church choir music — and provide opportunities for living composers.
The chorus was formed under founding director Marge Rawlins, who brought together five sections of the American Association of University Women from Palo Alto, Los Altos, MenloAtherton and other cities, said Anderson, who acts as the group’s historian and has 15 scrapbooks filled with chorus milestones.
Rawlins called it the University Women’s Chorus but soon opened it up to women without college degrees. Under Patricia Hennings, the longest serving director from 1975 to 2001, the group became the Peninsula Women’s Chorus.
“There was not a lot of music at the time specifically composed for women alone,” Anderson said. “There was Sweet Adelines, a women’s barbershop group, but our group is rather unique in that it was not in these 50 years affiliated with a church.”
Rawlins had a background of directing a Mother Singers group, which sang light show tunes at school concerts, Anderson said.
“When she started this choir, she upped the ante,” said Anderson, a second alto. “We sang in Latin, German, French, English. We always memorized all our music, so that was a challenge. It still is.”
Being a part of the chorus was a joy that grew into a big part of Anderson’s life, a commitment that needed full support from her husband and children. She’s missed one practice — to give birth to her son in the fall of 1966 — and would memorize music in the middle of the night while feeding him.
Anderson brought her kids to concerts starting from a young age and her daughter sang with the Peninsula group before moving on to the Wichita Symphony Orchestra Chorus.
“There’s going to be a time when I retire: Your voice goes, you can’t memorize anymore,” Anderson said. “But we have a good high school mentorship program and these young voices come back and sing with us regularly, and that’s very exciting for us.”
Eithne Pardini, president of the chorus’ board of directors, and her daughter, Ciara Karski, 26, is another mother-daughter pair involved with the choir.
Pardini’s sister, 12 years her senior, worked under Hennings and was the one who introduced Pardini to the chorus.
“I remember being 8 years old, going to concerts, completely enthralled and thinking ‘One of these days, this is going to be me.’ I was enchanted,” Pardini said.
The women in the chorus became Pardini’s family and the same is true for Pardini’s daughter and also her niece. When Pardini got married in 2003, she convinced her niece to sing in her place.
Pardini says her “choir bestie,” Beatrice Fanning, is another example: “Because of choir, our kids grew up together, our dogs grew up together. She sang at all of my family members’ funerals.”
Chorus members come from many different backgrounds, but they share a common love for music and a similar drive to share the joy of music with the community.
Every other year, the chorus organizes a “New Music for Treble Voices” choral festival in Palo Alto that brings together children and women groups from all over the world. The event has drawn groups such as Elektra Women’s Chorus from Canada and Vox Femina from Los Angeles.
The festival is an exchange of new music and, similar to the group’s spring and winter concerts, helps promote the works of contemporary composers, many of which are women.
One noteworthy piece the chorus helped commission over the years is “A Blessing of Cranes” by Abbie Betinis, who wrote the piece knowing about a thousand singers would perform the piece. The song honored the story of a Japanese girl who folded 1,000 paper cranes hoping she would be granted a wish: To heal from the leukemia she got from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the United Statse and to heal the world from war.
The group’s marketing chair, Yiting Jin, 31, said commissions the group is part of such as “A Blessing of Cranes,” and singing at schools and senior homes, is what inspires her about the chorus’ work.
Jin first heard of the chorus when she told her choir in Connecticut that she was moving to the Bay Area.
Jin went to their spring concert in 2011 and remembers being impressed by what sounded like a chorus made up of professional singers. Jin, who sings for fun, auditioned and got in later that year.
Another surprise for Jin was that the chorus goes on tour every five years or so and has national and international reach. She went on a three-city tour through Argentina with the chorus in 2015.