By Raffles Chorale EXCO ‘26
“There is no such beauty as where you belong.”
If you’ve heard this line echoing through stairwells or seen it on the back of our jackets, that’s us: Raffles Chorale. This lyric comes from our legacy song The Road Home by Stephen Paulus, and honestly, it sums us up pretty well.
As a performing arts CCA, beauty, above all, is the ideal we strive to achieve. Chorale derives that beauty not just from working towards musical excellence in our performances, but—at the risk of sounding extremely clichéd—especially from the family that we have built.
From the outside, Chorale might look like:
- That suspiciously huge friend group taking photos after every school event (spoiler: not a class, just us)
- A spontaneous choir serenading the canteen on the way to food (again, us)
- That viral video of people singing Travis Scott’s “FE!N” with 200k+ likes on TikTok and Instagram (yup… also us)
So, what do we actually do besides vibe in stairwells?
The RI student who chooses to join Raffles Chorale is decidedly non-average. Getting down to business, the Chorale experience as a CCA member includes three main performance opportunities during your time in Chorale: an art season performance, our annual year-end student-led concert, Vocal Delights, and the biannual Singapore Youth Festival.
Vocal Delights is entirely student-run, meaning your batch will get the opportunity to choose your own repertoire, have creative agency over aspects ranging from staging to storyline, and of course enjoy the thrill of performing for schoolmates and members of the public.
We form small groups that perform arrangements of different genres of music, alongside an original musical, performed by the subgroup known as PUNCH, and traditional chorale music, performed by the subgroup known as Fringe.
In addition to Vocal Delights, we have an annual concert as part of the school’s ARTSeason. Our April 2024 concert, An Ode To Spring, was held at the Victoria Concert Hall, where we performed alongside our Year 1-4 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 was an SYF year, meaning we got the opportunity to perform at School of the Arts alongside incredible choirs from schools across Singapore. In addition to 2025’s set piece, we performed works in Japanese, Swedish, and Finnish, and spent some of the most joy-filled, fulfilling time of our student lives bringing our performance closer to perfection. You can read more about our SYF experience here.
If this all sounds like a lot, fear not—no music background is required to join Chorale, and your welcoming seniors will guide you through the intricacies of choral singing. Join us, and you’ll gain music, memories, laughter, and friends to last a lifetime.
So, come join Chorale, for a place where you can truly belong.
Information and Contacts
Practice Timings: Mondays 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm, Wednesdays 8:00 am – 11:00 am
Teachers-in-charge:
Dr Ruth Rodrigues
Mr Caleb Liu
