Cornell Glee Club to tour the West Coast, then perform on campus in January

On Jan. 4 the Cornell Glee Club will embark on a 16-day tour of the West Coast. Destinations will include Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The tour will conclude with concerts at Elmira College Jan. 20 and at Cornell's Center for Theatre Arts Jan. 29.

The first half of each concert will consist of choral music for men from a variety of cultures. The repertoire ranges from European Renaissance to folk music of the Americas. In the second half, the Hangovers, the a cappella subset of the Glee Club, will perform several original arrangements of popular music. The final portion of the concerts will be devoted to traditional Cornell songs, including Give My Regards to Davy and the Cornell Alma Mater.

Highlights of the repertoire include Susa's Dirge from Cymbeline and Janacek's Ave Maria, both set to text by two of Britain's greatest poets. William Shakespeare provides the text for the dirge, a reflection of two youths on the severity of life and the "quiet consummation" of death. The text for Janacek's Ave Maria is a Czech translation of a poem by Lord Byron -- a meditation on nature and one's homeland, interwoven with the Ave Maria prayer.

Another selection will be Canticle by Cornell graduate David Conte, MFA '82, DMA '83. The piece was composed for the Cornell Glee Club, for which Conte served as assistant director. Conte currently lives in San Francisco, where he teaches composition and theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

The Cornell University Glee Club, founded in 1868, is one of the oldest groups of its kind in the country. The Glee Club has performed throughout the United States and in more than 20 countries, including the People's Republic of China, Germany, Great Britain, the former Soviet Union and Japan. The group also has performed live on NBC, CBS, PBS and the BBC. Recent accomplishments include Bach's St. John Passion under the direction of Peter Schreier and Verdi's Requiem with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. For more information, contact Glee Club secretary Charles Walter, 255-3396, or visit the group's web site at, http://gleeclub.cornell.edu.