Our Story

It all started in 1985 with two altos, a mailing list and fond musical memories of singing together with other Berkeley students in the early 1960s.

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 friends 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 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 singers in the Bay Area announcing the formation of an alumni chorus, directed by Carol Young who at the time was the choral director of Cal’s Student Musical Activities organization. On May 20, 1985, roughly 30 singers showed up for the group's first rehearsal.

UC Alumni Chorus started small, singing publicly for the first time at the grand opening of Ardenwood Park in Fremont, and giving concerts mostly in Bay Area churches. As UCAC grew, in size, quality, and reputation, it seized opportunities to sing in grander venues (including Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, for the AIDS Day of Remembrance, and UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, among others) and to collaborate with a wide variety of other performing ensembles and artists, in addition to regularly presenting its own programs of diverse shorter choral works thoughtfully selected to support a unifying theme.

Over the last 25 years, UC Alumni Chorus has usually had between 75 and 100 singers. We often develop smaller ensembles, semi-choruses, and soloists from within the chorus, and often join other groups to form a massed choir of 200+ singers. This enables us to successfully navigate everything from madrigals and jazz tunes to symphonic masterworks. The Chorus has performed major works including Mozart's Requiem (new Levin edition), Honegger’s King David, Duruflé’s Requiem, Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna and Midwinter Songs, Handel’s Samson, Britten’s Cantata Misericordium, Mahler’s Second Symphony, Conte’s I Dream a World, and Dvořák’s Stabat Mater. We collaborated with both UC Berkeley Dance students (in Hertz Hall in 2000) and San Francisco’s Smuin Ballet Company (in the Berkeley Community Theater in 2015) to present Orff’s Carmina Burana as a live-music ballet.

UC Alumni Chorus has enjoyed many opportunities to work with living composers. To honor the memory of co-founder Ronni Gravitz, we commissioned (with special permission of the J.R.R. Tolkien estate) a setting by Gwyneth Walker of Tolkien’s poem, The Road Goes Ever On, and premiered that piece in 2007. With the UC Wind Ensemble, in 2013, UC Alumni Chorus commissioned and presented the world premiere of Darkness and Beauty of Stars by Berkeley alumnus Mark Popeney. And our Spring 2017 and Spring 2018 concerts included pieces newly composed by chorus members Raymond Chen, Nathan Odendahl, and Jessica Margolin.

From the start, UCAC’s concerts have often featured music of the theater, from Purcell to Sondheim. In 1994 the Chorus diversified into semi-staged theatrical performance with a production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial by Jury. We then joined the acclaimed Berkeley Opera company for productions including Berlioz’ Beatrice and Benedict in 1995 and Verdi’s Macbeth in 2005. UCAC has also presented staged radio shows using popular music of the 1930s and 1940s. In 2022, in an extravaganza of a send-off for our retiring long-time Music Director, Dr. Mark Sumner, and assistant director and accompanist William Garcia Ganz, we performed “The Eleven O’Clock Number,” a six-act mashup of Broadway musical theater songs arranged by Dr. Sumner himself, with an accompanying autobiographical multimedia presentation and choreographed finale.

In addition to theater and dance, the Chorus has provided live music for film. In 2008, UCAC, along with members of the UCCE chamber choir, Perfect Fifth, gave two highly successful performances of Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light, accompanying the 1929 silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. The Chorus was twice invited to reprise that work, with Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony as part of the Cal Performances series, and at the Turner Classic Movie (TCM) film festival in Spring 2016 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.

The Chorus enjoys taking its music on the road. In 1988, UC Alumni Chorus traveled to Australia to perform at the EXPO in Brisbane. This was the first of many tours. In July of 1997, with then-acting music director William Garcia Ganz, the Chorus performed Brahms' German Requiem with other choirs in Lichfield Cathedral, om Birmingham, 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. Under the direction of Dr. Mark Sumner, who served as Music Director from Fall 1997 through Spring 2022, UC Alumni Chorus continued to travel around the world regularly, including trips to the Czech Republic and Hungary, China, the Baltics (Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Russia), South America (Uruguay and Argentina), Cuba, Mexico, and Italy (by invitation of the Santa Barbara Choral Society, with the renowned American composer Morten Lauridsen). The Chorus is planning a tour of Japan in 2026, our first with current Music Director Dr. Paul Flight.

UCAC also travels domestically. In the summer of 2009, the Chorus was invited to participate in the International Choral Festival in Missoula, Montana. And the Chorus has enjoyed multiple collaborations with other California choirs, both traveling to and hosting joint performances with the Claremont Chorale and the Santa Barbara Choral Society.

UC Alumni Chorus has grown a great deal in every sense of the word since that kitchen-table meeting in 1985, but its core purposes have never changed. The Chorus welcomes, supports and collaborates with the excitingly diverse musicians and artists of the University, Berkeley, and California community. Our members enjoy learning, rehearsing, and performing challenging music at a high level of quality, whether their undergraduate days ended last year, last century, or anytime in between. We hope you’ll come to a concert and enjoy hearing us.