Chenyi Tracy Yao was a senior in Chorus Angelicus for four full years. She is graduating as an international student from Winsted’s excellent The Gilbert School, where we usually recruit for our choirs thanks to the kind agency of Mr. Adam Atkins, their choir teacher, and a big fan of our organization and a former Gaudie himself.
Having Tracy with us was magical! I particularly relate to international students because of my own binational identity, and because of having been an international college grad student when I moved to the US. The fullness of experiences that they bring is unrivaled. Tracy represented a window into the incredibly rich Chinese culture of her native Hangzhou.
Logistics and planning for international students are definitely more complicated than for our regular choristers. They depend on the generosity and openhandedness of their homestay families. Tracy’s tutors were remarkably supportive of her being a senior for Chorus Angelicus and did their very best to ensure Tracy was at every rehearsal and performance, even with the countless rivaling activities, commitments, and extracurricular obligations she had to answer to, as a top-notch student at The Gilbert School. Tracy did an amazing job at negotiating the demands of her hectic schedule. A quick “texter,” she would swiftly keep me posted about future conflicts, or situations that might pose an incompatibility with CA’s agenda, even for other choristers, such as auditions and shows for the statewide regional music festivals.
We are going to miss Tracy dearly. She had shared with me, at the beginning of this choral season, a series of gorgeous Chinese choral gems that I had planned to perform as part of the Missa Gaia concert. I was so excited to get to sing in Mandarin with Tracy’s coaching. We will hopefully get to do that next year.
As Tracy is off to the outstanding Smith College in Northampton, we not only wish her the best, we also hope that she can come back from time to time, to say hello, or maybe even take us up to Northampton for a field trip and concert there. Keep following your dreams, Tracy: you’ll do wonderfully!
Gabriel Löfvall
