The choral program hadn’t even officially begun at Saturday’s 60th anniversary celebration of the D.C. Youth Chorale and sweet sounds were already pouring from a group of singers.
“They’re just feeling the space,” said Gail Robinson-Oturu, who with Monica Spencer had organized the reunion at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on 15th Street NW. It was still the mix-and-mingle stage of the afternoon, with attendees greeting one another and making bids on silent auction items. But a group of singers had assembled at the base of the altar, seeing how their voices echoed in the vaulted room.
“You can’t stop us,” said Robinson-Oturu.
From its creation in 1961 until its dissolution in 1995, the D.C. Youth Chorale (DCYC) took the finest voices from the city’s public high schools and molded them into a hundred-strong choir. This reunion, sponsored by D.C. Youth Chorale Legacy, was a chance for alumni to reconnect, raise money to support youth arts programs — and sing.
Robinson-Oturu first heard the chorale when she was 11 and it performed at her church, Tabor Presbyterian in Northwest.
“I was just transfixed,” she said.
Robinson-Oturu longed to someday belong. She summoned the nerve to approach Edward Jackson, who directed the choir from 1966 to 1995, confessing to him that her voice probably wasn’t as good as the soloists she had heard.
Jackson said to her: “I don’t need a group of soloists. I need a group of workers.”
Robinson-Oturu became a member in 1968. Several nights a week, students from around the District would come together to practice — first at Roosevelt High, then at other schools.
The approach Jackson used — he described it as “discipline, standards, excellence, success” — earned the D.C. Youth Chorale honors such as a spot on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” a State Department-sponsored tour of Romania, performances at World’s Fairs in New York City and Spokane, Wash., and appearances at the Kennedy Center and elsewhere in Washington. Among its members: mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves.
“It stretched my abilities,” said Ivan McDowell, who graduated from McKinley in 1981. He already played the trumpet, but the complexities of choral music were new to him. And if he’d stayed in the brass section, he may never have confronted the foreign languages the choir members were required to familiarize themselves with: Latin, French, German. The group’s repertoire spanned the globe.
The chorale was founded by Frances White Hughes, a music teacher at Anacostia, Roosevelt and Ballou high schools. The early 1960s was a time when gifted and talented programs were starting to catch on, Robinson-Oturu said, putting the focus on academic subjects such as math and English.
“She thought the school system needed something for students who were talented in the arts,” Robinson-Oturu said. So Hughes created what at first was called Young Scholars With Special Gifts.
“It was accessible. There was no charge,” Robinson-Oturu said.
Whatever your background — singing church music every Sunday or growing up in a home where music was seldom heard — you would learn. Eventually there was a feeder program from the city’s elementary school and junior highs, run by Yvette Holt.
Reunion attendees on Saturday remembered and celebrated all of the voice teachers and accompanists who had worked with them. Wilma Shakesnider was a direct link to Hughes. Though she’d graduated before the chorus was founded, Hughes taught her. Shakesnider went on to sing opera in Houston, Berlin and New York. She’s 80 now, a bit tentative on her feet, but when she opened her mouth and that trained soprano voice issued forth with a passage from the opera “Hérodiade” by Jules Massenet, it raised goose bumps.
Hughes passed the reins to Jackson in 1966. The D.C. Youth Chorale folded in 1995. That was the year Edwards retired from the school system as teacher at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. No one could say exactly why. Perhaps it was just the sort of program that needed a single strong advocate.
The D.C. Youth Chorale’s legacy echoes on in its members, most of whom continue to sing, many of whom teach. Some have started their own groups, including the Washington Women’s Chorale and the Artists Group of Washington, both of which performed at the anniversary celebration.
Detra Battle Washington, a 1979 graduate of McKinley, remembers the way the chorus taught members to blend their voices, to be their best. She teaches voice around the city, including at Howard University.
“When times get rough, music is where I go,” she said. “People who don’t have music, there’s a void in their lives.”
