Jamestown College Concert Choir
In 1969, Smith took over as director of the Jamestown College Concert Choir. Through a combination of strict discipline and intense musical training, Smith turned the choir - unusual among top-flight concert choirs in that less than 25% its members were music majors - into a highly well-regarded choir.
In 1972, on the choir's first tour of Europe, it became the first American choir of any kind to sing at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris - an honor they repeated on several subsequent tours.
In 1984 Smith was appointed Dean, a position he held for over a decade. He also filled in occasionally during those years as a biochemistry teacher, exercising his old master's degree.
On October 13, 1994, Smith conducted a 25th anniversary reunion concert at the Jamestown Civic Center; everyone who had ever sung in the choir was invited; 400 singers - over 40% of the choir's entire alumni body - participated.
Read more about this topic: Richard Harrison Smith
Famous quotes containing the words jamestown, college, concert and/or choir:
“Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.... [The Nazis] have made it clear that not only do they intend to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Placing too much importance on where a child goes rather than what he does there . . . doesn’t take into account the child’s needs or individuality, and this is true in college selection as well as kindergarten.”
—Norman Giddan (20th century)
“Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“O thou, with dewy locks, who lookest down
Through the clear windows of the morning; turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!”
—William Blake (1757–1827)