By Isaac Chan (25A01B), Chairperson
“There is no such beauty as where you belong.”
This line, a lyric from our signature song The Road Home by Stephen Paulus, guides Raffles Chorale. As a Performing Arts CCA, we chase beauty in our work, applying techniques and picking at the subtlest of details to deliver the tapestries of sound we aspire toward. But beauty comes most of all from the community that we build.
As clichéd as it sounds, Chorale really is a family of singers. Maybe you’ll hear us belting out notes as we learn our repertoire if you wander the corridors of Block A. Maybe you’ll even encounter us spontaneously bursting into song together while walking to get a meal, which we have after most CCA sessions. You might have even seen our publicity for our concert last year, which blew up on TikTok and Instagram(!). Chorale is about the beauty and joy of making music together, and we’d love to bring you along on the journey.
Our hard work culminates in two main events: an art season performance and our annual year-end student-led concert, Vocal Delights. In VD, our choristers have the unique opportunity to choose repertoire and organise our very own in-school concert. We form small groups that perform arrangements of different genres of music such as Christmas music, Pop, or Jazz alongside the two signature segments PUNCH and Fringe. PUNCH puts up an original musical, while Fringe performs the traditional choral music that Chorale typically otherwise stages. Chorale also partners with a beneficiary who receives all the proceeds from the concert, so Vocal Delights also helps the wider community in tandem with our artistry. In 2024, we partnered with Kindle Garden, Singapore’s first inclusive pre-school providing immersive bilingual education to all children.
In addition to Vocal Delights, we have an annual concert as part of the school’s Arts Season. Our April 2024 concert An Ode To Spring was held at the Victoria Concert Hall, where we performed alongside our RI Y1-4 counterpart, Raffles Voices. We performed works in a multitude of languages, including Latin, Japanese, and Tagalog, and genres ranged from the liturgical choral music of centuries past to vivacious modern songs.
2025 will also be an SYF year — at SYF, Chorale performs a selection of technically difficult, but undoubtedly beautiful, repertoire from various periods and styles. At our last SYF performance in 2023, we performed three pieces — in addition to the set piece, Morning rain by Americ Goh, we presented Kyrie by Swedish composer Johan Lindegren, a beautiful Romantic piece. Immediately after, we launched into Father Thunder by Laura Jekabsone, a powerful song with mouth and body percussion that recreates the sounds of a roaring rainstorm and wild winds. Such is a sample of the eclectic selection of pieces that you will learn in Chorale, and a peek into the versatility of style and appreciation for variety that you will develop. You can listen to our SYF 2023 performance here:
Challenging and painstaking as preparing for such performances will be, don’t be deterred — no music background is required and your welcoming seniors will guide you through the intricacies of choral singing. You’ll develop mental rigour through practice and improvement and an appreciation for what may be a new art form, or a fresh perspective on a familiar craft.
So, come join Chorale — Chorale is where you can belong.
Information and Contacts
Practice Timings: Mondays 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm, Wednesdays 8:00 am – 11:00 am
Teachers-in-charge: Mr Caleb Liu, Mr Maverick Teo, Dr Ruth Rodrigues
If you have questions, please email caleb.liu@ri.edu.sg (Mr. Caleb Liu, Teacher I/C) 25YCHAN553A@student.ri.edu.sg (Isaac Chan, Chairperson).
