The Cornell Glee Club and the University Chorus walked and sang on the Great Wall, visited several schools and performed for audiences in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong during a concert tour of the People's Republic of China, March 11-26.

"It was a great trip -- it was tiring but well worth it," said Scott Tucker, the Priscilla Edwards Browning Director of Choral Music at Cornell. "A lot of it went so smoothly; that was a surprise in itself."

Tucker and the group of 80 singers were accompanied by assistant conductor John Rowehl, physician Catherine Husa '73 (the daughter of Cornell professor emeritus of music Karel Husa) and choral ensembles supporter Percy Browning '56.

They held six concerts, including three performances of Johannes Brahms' "Ein deutsches Requiem." The work calls for more than 100 voices and a large orchestra; joint concerts were staged with the Hong Kong Bach Choir and Orchestra, the Shanghai International Festival Chorus, and the International Festival Chorus and Orchestra, who accompanied the Cornell singers March 15 at Beijing's Forbidden City Concert Hall.

"To sing with this orchestra -- which was all Chinese nationals -- this great masterwork of Western culture, was wonderful," Tucker said. "I think all the musicians in the orchestra particularly appreciated what we were bringing. One of the things the Cornell choirs do very well is a clean, very precise, very pristine sound."

The Forbidden City concert occurred while China was beginning to crack down on rioting in Tibet, Tucker said.

"I think everybody felt a sense of being in a very different place, where there was a kind of nervousness about big groups of foreigners being there," he said. "There was a layer or two of bureaucracy around everything we did, with all the passes and checkpoints."

Sightseeing also inspired music far from the concert halls. A small group of Cornellians stopped to sing the American spiritual "All My Trials" while walking atop the Great Wall. "All of us were proud to be standing on that wall, bringing our music to the other side of the world," Aaron Rubin '08 wrote in the group's online tour diary.

The group also visited sites for the 2008 Olympic games coming up in Beijing. "The city seemed to be buzzing with Olympic fever, with countdown clocks, posters and merchandise everywhere," said Nina Coutinho '08, who was struck by "the foods, the smells, the sights ... an amazing combination of ancient history and the most modern Western and Eastern culture."

A subset of the choir, comprising 20 seniors, performed selections from the tour repertoire and some Cornell songs at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, for a small audience that included U.S. Ambassador Clark Randt and his family, and members of the U.S. Foreign Service and the Cornell Club of Beijing.

Other concerts were much larger -- with up to 160 singers on stage at one point. The Shanghai Oriental Arts Center "had about the most beautiful acoustics I'd ever encountered," Tucker said. "It makes you sing better and kind of organically helps the performance."

A highlight in Shanghai for Coutinho "was meeting some local migrant children and singing with them," she said. "They tried to teach us some Chinese ... some were more successful than others, but it was incredibly fun."

Between performances, the group visited six schools, including Beida and Fudan universities, where they interacted with Chinese students, singing and playing volleyball and other games, and learning about student life in China.

"The school exchanges were wonderful -- we sang for them, they sang for us," Tucker said.

The Cornell students also took time to record some of their tour experiences on a blog and video diary at http://www.china.gleeclub.com.

"The thing you see most in a trip like this, in the end the students were clearly affected," Tucker said. "I think they're still processing this now. When China is in the news, they're going to read it with different eyes."