Penn Glee Club performs in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Beijing
The Penn Glee Club performed at the famous Suntory Hall in Tokyo, an art gallery in Hong Kong, and the U.S. embassy in Beijing during a 12-day tour of Asia. Forty members went on the tour, including 25 singers, eight band members, and seven technical crew.
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The Penn Glee Club went on a 12-day tour of Asia, performing in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Beijing. It was the first tour for the new director (center) Sam Scheibe.
“We even managed to teach everyone the arm wave. Some of the Penn alums in the audience were able to help,” says Sam Scheibe, who is completing his first year as director. “Getting off the plane and then going and performing in Suntory Hall was such an amazing feeling, to realize that we had come so far. Our whole year seemed to culminate at that moment.”
Tokyo was the first stop in a 12-day tour that also took a group of 25 singers, eight band members, and seven technical crew to perform at an art gallery in Hong Kong and the United States embassy in Beijing to perform. They also experienced the cultures in each country, such as taking a bullet train to Kyoto in Japan, hiking the Hong Kong Trail, and walking along the Great Wall of China.
The Glee Club and students in the Wagner Society Choirs of Japan’s Keio University sang together in a collaborative concert.
The Glee Club, which typically does an international tour every other year, last traveled to Asia in 2019, before becoming fully gender inclusive in 2021 after 159 years of only male singers. Rising fourth-year Hailey Tobin planned the tour, working closely with alumni to make connections and trip decisions.
“It was really amazing to be able to perform and see how engaged the Penn alumni were in Asia,” says Julia Gauffreau, a rising fourth-year and the incoming Club president. Gauffreau, from Media, Pennsylvania, is in the Vagelos Program in the Molecular Life Sciences in the College of Arts & Sciences, studying biophysics, biochemistry, and chemistry.
A cross-cultural collaboration
The Tokyo performance was a collaboration with the Wagner Society Choirs of Japan’s Keio University. They previously collaborated in 2019 with their all-male choirs. “This year was incredibly special because we had the full range of voices,” says Kyne Wang, outgoing Glee Club president, who graduated in May from the Vagelos Life Sciences and Management Program, a dual-degree program in the School of Arts & Sciences and the Wharton School. “It was a dream come true to be able to perform on this tour.”
Each of the choirs did a 50-minute set before singing one piece together, “If Music Be the Food of Love” by David Dickau. “It was a really powerful experience to have the singers from both groups perform together,” Scheibe says.
Wang, a classical pianist and a singer, says Suntory Hall to him is at the level of performing in Carnegie Hall in New York City. More than 150 people were in the audience, including many Glee Club alums, who joined onstage to sing “Afterglow,” their signature alumni song.
“We were very interested in cultural exchange,” Scheibe says, especially in that collaborative concert. Many of the pieces were from the fall and spring shows along with the traditional Glee Club repertoire. But they also sang pieces chosen specifically for the tour, including one in Japanese and another in Mandarin.
Another was John Denver’s “Country Roads,” because it was featured in an anime–Mimi o Sumaseba (“Whisper of the Heart“)–that is popular in Japan. “We knew that would be a hit,” so we invited them to sing along with us,” Scheibe says.
Hong Kong and Beijing
In Hong Kong, the Glee Club performed at the Alisan Fine Arts Gallery, a family gallery run by Class of 1991 alum Daphne King-Yao, whose daughters are in the classes of 2025 and 2027.
The group paired songs with five works in the gallery in an event called “Sight and Sound,” which “shared similar stories and similar aesthetic views,” Scheibe says. The singers started at one end of the gallery and moved to stand in front of each piece as they sang.
“It was just a very fun way to see people abroad that you see on campus but also be able to share music in a whole different environment with them and the Penn community,” Wang says, noting that the gallery was packed while they were performing.
The group also performed at the American Club of Hong Kong and was also invited to perform as feature artists at The Aftermath, a live music and arts space in Hong Kong. Wang says more than 300 people attended the performance at the embassy in Beijing.
“We got flocked right after with a bunch of audience members, taking photos. It was crazy,” Wang says of the embassy performance. “They all said how excited they were to see us.”
Singing “Afterglow” had special meaning for the May graduates, especially Wang, who conducted. “Now as an alum, it really is hitting me that these traditions and songs that we do with the Glee Club, and with the University, are something that transcends generations of Penn students,” says Wang, who will start a new job in New York City this summer. “This tour was just magical, and I was very fortunate to be able to finish my time at Penn with the Glee Club.”
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