Our Mission
The UC Alumni Chorus is a high-quality performing chorus representing the University of California at Berkeley (Cal) community. We are committed to supporting the enjoyment of choral singing after undergraduate life through education, rehearsal, and performance of challenging choral music.
UCAC has an additional mission that distinguishes it from other Bay Area singing groups. It is committed to providing musical and financial support to the University of California Choral Ensembles (UCCE), a student-run umbrella organization comprised of several vocal groups on the Berkeley campus of which UCAC is one. Musical support is provided by performing with the students in one or two annual concerts. UCAC members provide financial support to UCCE by spearheading fund-raising activities to help offset shrinking campus resources, contributing towards much needed equipment, and helping with replacement costs and capital improvements.
In the Spring of 1985, two former members of the Treble Clef, Ronni Gravitz and Alma Raymond, united with Music Director Carol Young to organize a chorus of Cal student singing groups’ alumni. Together they inspired other like-minded singers who also wanted to rekindle the musical and social associations they had enjoyed as students. Many of those original thirty members are still singing with the UCAC these many years later.
Music Director Dr. Mark Sumner, joined UCAC in the Fall of 1997, at which time we began taking a more active role in the support of the student singing groups under UCCE. The combined talents of our Director and our Accompanist, William Garcia Ganz, have improved the quality of our chorus and the breadth of our repertoire. Recent major works include Mozart's Requiem and Mass in C minor (both, the new Levin edition), Durufle's Requiem, Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, performed with the UC Wind Ensemble and UC Men's and Women's Chorales, Lauridsen's Fire and Midwinters Songs, Handel's Samson, and Britten's Cantata Misericordium. In Spring 2015 we performed Carmina Burana accompanied by the SF Smuin Ballet Company at the Berkeley Community Theater. Many other concerts have featured numerous shorter choral works all presented to support an especially themed program.
In 1994 UCAC diversified into theater with a semi-staged production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Trial by Jury, and in 1995 performed in a concert production of Berlioz' Beatrice and Benedict with the acclaimed Berkeley Opera company. Again in 2005, the chorus performed in Berkeley Opera's concert production of Verdi's Macbeth. The Chorus has also presented staged radio shows using popular music of the 1930s and 1940s.
A recent undertaking was Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light, accompanied by the 1929 silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, which had two highly successful performances in 2008, and which the Chorus has twice been invited to reprise, with Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony as part of the Cal Performances series, and most recently at the Turner Classic Movie (TCM) film festival in Spring 2016 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.
The Chorus also enjoys taking its music on the road. Highlights of its first decade include an appearance at the EXPO 88 in Brisbane as part of a concert tour of Australia and New Zealand. In July of 1997, with then-acting music director William Garcia Ganz, the Chorus performed Brahms' German Requiem with other choirs in Lichfield Cathedral, England, as part of the Lichfield Festivals. This was the musical highlight of a tour which also included stops in London, York, and Oxford, and a master class with the King's Singers.
UCAC has continued to tour around the world. In summer 2014 a group from the Chorus toured colonial Mexico with a program of music from the California Missions, and in spring of 2012, a group from the Chorus toured Cuba, enjoying a cultural exchange with choirs from Havana, Matanzas, Cienfuegos, and Santiago de Cuba. Previous tours were to the Czech Republic and Hungary, China, the Baltics (Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Russia), and South America (Uruguay and Argentina). In the summer of 2009, the Chorus was invited to participate in the International Choral Festival in Missoula, Montana and the ensemble has twice performed together with the Claremont Chorale, both in Claremont, California and in the Bay Area. In Summer of 2016 the Santa Barbara Choral Society, who collaborated with us in our 2015 Carmina Burana performance, invited us to tour Italy for 12 days with the renowned American composer, Morten Lauridsen.
Our Story
It all started with two altos, a mailing list and fond musical memories of singing together with other Berkeley students in the early '60s.
Inspired by the great times they had enjoyed as student singers, Alma Raymond, at the time a staff research associate in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, and Ronni Gravitz, an adviser in Career Planning and Placement, were eager for the chance to perform choral music once again.
"It was at the centennial reunion of the Cal Glee Club that some of us were complaining that there wasn't an opportunity on campus for us to sing in the type of chorus we had been involved with as student singers," said Raymond. Gravitz said she also missed singing with a medium sized chorus. "There are chamber groups and huge choruses that perform masterworks," she said, "but there is a whole repertory of a capella work that is appropriate for choruses with 50 to 60 singers."
So the women decided to try to inspire their old colleagues to join them for a risky experiment. With little more than an idea and the promise of a director, the pair hatched the idea of reuniting Berkeley alumni vocalists to sing together again. On May 20, 1985, roughly 30 singers showed up for the group's first rehearsal. The chorus started with small concerts, singing publicly for the first time at the grand opening of Ardenwood Park in Fremont. The group performed in Bay Area churches, and made regular appearances at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco as part of the AIDS Day of Remembrance. In 1988, UC Alumni Chorus traveled to Australia to perform at the EXPO in Brisbane. This was the first of many international and domestic tours.
On March 2, 1985, Gravitz and Raymond sat down at Raymond's kitchen table with husbands and kids and addressed 3,000 postcards to former Berkeley vocalists in the Bay Area announcing the formation of an alumni chorus, directed by Carol Young who at the time was the choral director of Student Musical Activities (now called University of California Choral Ensembles--UCCE).
Raymond said she also enjoys sharing the Hertz Hall stage with the student choruses at least once each year.Although initially established for alumni of the Berkeley campus student choruses, UCAC soon opened up auditions to University faculty, staff, and alumni of other UC campuses.
A percentage of membership is also open to Bay Area community singers. The chorus kept growing, both in size and musical achievement. Raymond said the chorus is lively and diverse. "I like the mixture of ages in the chorus. We have everyone from graduate students to those of us who met decades ago as student singers….we see our old buddies and get to know new people." "We want people to know we are serious about the music and about the need to perform it well, but there's also a lot of fun involved in making serious music"