Sydney Pepper, President of the CU Choirs

This blog entry was written by Sydney Pepper, President of the Clark University Choirs.  Enjoy!

I had never heard of Gena Branscombe until Dan Ryan mentioned her and her Choral Drama, Pilgrims of Destiny, as a piece for the Clark University Choirs to do in the spring semester, 2019. Even then, I was unsure of what the piece was or really, the enormity of what our choir would be doing in performing this work would be. I was excited, but only as excited as you can be in knowing you’re going to sing rep you’ve never sung before.

Once the fall semester was going, we started having more and more conversations about Gena and about Pilgrims, and slowly but surely my curiosity grew. With this curiosity grew more excitement, and a bit of nervousness. I was starting to fall in love with the little bits I was learning about Gena, but terrified at the prospect of doing this piece; as President of choirs, I was privy to exactly how many musicians we needed to create the orchestra for the piece, and exactly how far short the choir budget fell.

Clark Choirs have undergone a tremendous period of growth in the past few years, with the help and dedication of Professor Dan Ryan. While our growth was substantial, nothing seemed to be quite enough to incite enough excitement from our colleagues in Student Council for them to increase our budget by any substantial amounts. The battle started last year when my friends and colleagues, Katherine Battey and Carly Massino, petitioned Student Council endlessly for more funds to subsidize the costs of this year. Nothing was quite enough to get through to them.

This year, we faced many of the same battles. Our membership grew even more significantly and we didn’t have enough chairs, folders, or concert attire to go around. Thankfully, we were lucky enough to get a grant from the Student Council and help from the music department to subsidize the costs of chairs and folders, but this didn’t help with the dire situation that was our functioning budget.

For the academic year, we were allocated only $5,000—which, with a choir of 75, was not enough. Throughout the fall semester, we spent over half of this (while cutting costs everywhere we could). I knew that we wouldn’t be able to hire the orchestra we needed to do any justice to Gena with what we had left, and quite frankly, I was worried.

Between semesters, Student Council allows us to petition for more funds toward our club budgets. Carly and I petitioned for nearly $20,000, in an attempt to show them how much the true operating budget of a choir our size should be. Initially, they awarded us nothing. We were then allowed to make an appeal.

Carly and I prepared our points and met with the Financial Committee of the Student Council. We explained what the rest of our semester looked like and told them about Gena and Pilgrims. We explained how monumental our performance would be and detailed the numerous relatives of Gena and her publishers that would be attending our concert. We showed them the press release published by Clark and told them of the orchestra we would need to do the piece justice. They seemed intrigued, but knowing that we had fought this battle before, we asked that they simply fund our attendance at the ACDA Choral Festival this February.

We waited weeks to hear back from them. We weren’t waiting with baited breath; we knew that the likelihood of receiving anything was honestly pretty far-fetched. We would have been happy with any small amount they would have given us, but we were prepared to be denied once again.

Last week, Carly called me. She said, “I heard from Student Council, and I might start crying,” to which I said, “Oh, so they didn’t give us any money.” She forwarded me the email she received from the Financial Committee, which stated that they had awarded us $7,791 to fund the concert. We were both in shock, as was Dan when we shared the news with him. Gena and her music helped us to make an impact on the committee and receive enough money to help subsidize the costs of the concert greatly. We are grateful to Student Council to seeing and responding to our need and supporting this incredible project. More so, we are beyond grateful to Gena for helping choir with her story and we hope this helps do her piece justice this spring. #BringingBackBranscombe.

#BringingBackBranscombe