Friends University’s Singing Quakers to celebrate 90 years

They’ve sung at the White House and ground zero, in Carnegie Hall and in a little Baptist church in St. Petersburg. They encountered dust storms during the Great Depression and a snow storm in New Zealand.

The Singing Quakers of Friends University have covered a lot of miles and vocal literature during their 90-year history.

The choir will mark that anniversary with a concert and reunion Saturday at Friends. The performance will feature singing by the current choir, alumni choir and former members in town for the reunion.

Mark Bartel, the choir’s director, said the 70 current members are much like their predecessors – not surprising since many had parents, aunts, uncles or older siblings who belonged to the same group.

“It’s about the music, but it is really all about the relationships, the opportunity to be a part of something that is bigger than yourself,” he said. “They find it to be a huge part of their college experience.”

The choir has always included a mix of music majors and talented singers studying for other careers. And it’s usually served up a mix of sacred and popular songs. Saturday’s concert will range from “Ritmo,” a lively Spanish tune, to a Gilbert and Sullivan melody to a spiritual called “Ain’t Got Time to Die.”

The choir traces its history to the 1920s, when mens and womens glee clubs performed on campus. During the 1924-25 school year, the decision was made to have them sing together, at least for some events, and before long somebody dubbed them the “Singing Quakers,” in recognition of the religious denomination that founded Friends.

Bartel said the name was somewhat ironic because many early Quaker congregations discouraged singing as a worldly distraction, but in any case, “The name stuck.”

The choir made tours of the state and country from its early years. During the Depression, a concert in Dodge City had to be canceled because a huge dust storm made it impossible to see the road beyond Pratt.

Cecil Riney took over as director in 1960 and spent the next 45 years in that position.

“I came here out of grad school,” he said. “I didn’t plan to stay that long, but I did.”

It was under Riney that the choir started its international trips, one every four years, to Europe, Mexico, Australia and elsewhere.

They performed in West Berlin and visited then-Communist East Berlin. Returning by bus to what was then west Germany, one of the choir’s singers got sick. Riney said he was warned anybody who got off the bus might be shot in the fenced-off corridor that ran through east Germany. Riney and his wife took the girl off the bus and into a bathroom anyway, as soldiers watched with guns drawn.

The choir sang in a small Baptist church in St. Petersburg a few years after the Iron Curtain came down. “That place was jammed, people standing in the rafters,” Riney said. “We could hardly get he choir in there. They were so hungry for just freedom.”

In this country, the choir has performed at Carnegie Hall several times and the White House for the Christmas tree lightning ceremony as President Nixon and his family looked on. A few weeks later, a White House aide called Riney offering the choir another chance to perform, for a visiting foreign delegation. Riney had to tell the aide the choir was already booked that day, but elicited a promise that they’d be invited back again.

“By George, it was not six or eight weeks later that Watergate happened,” Riney said. “I never heard another word, of course.”

The choir sang “America the Beautiful” one morning at ground zero in New York a few months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “One couple from Alabama came up to me and said your singing at this site was the most impressive thing we’ve seen in years,” Riney said. “It was kind of moving.”

In May, the current choir will travel to Costa Rica to perform and participate in a community service project. To help pay for that trip, the choir will accept donations Saturday and also offer a 21-track CD called “When I Survey” that it recently recorded.

The alumni choir was formed 20 years ago. Its 90 members meet once a week to practice, and stage one major show a year. This year it will be held Nov. 8 at Eastminster Presbyterian Church on Webb Road.

“There are some very good singers” in it, Riney said, including many area music teachers and professionals.

Even more voices will be raised at the end of Saturday’s concert. The current choir, alumni choir and some of the 150 former choir members attending the reunion will perform two songs.

“One of them is not that hard,” Riney said. “The other has some extremely tricky sections. You know, with 200 people, it’s not going to be a walk in the park.”

Riney said he’ll rehearse the big group Saturday morning to make sure the standards of the Singing Quakers are maintained.

“This one (alum) said ‘Can I just come on Saturday night and sing with you?’” Riney said. “I said ‘not hardly.’ We’re not doing a couple of pickup tunes.”

This story was originally published October 1, 2014 at 9:43 PM with the headline "Friends University’s Singing Quakers to celebrate 90 years."