an example of when i said this sometimes to singers and in rehearsal all the singers b p m many of them do all kinds of things for their in their lives and they have all kinds of things going on in their lives but i think at any time and especially right now with all the things that are happening all over the globe and in our country it means so much that one hundred people are willing to put aside an evening a week and say i'm going to give up whatever it is that you might otherwise be doing on a tuesday night to sit in a room with a hundred people and put ensemble ahead of myself put listening ahead of yapping right on that people come in with a cooperative spirit and no matter how they might disagree otherwise they're willing to sit there and so after my swim one day i walked into the director of the adult programs and said how would you like to start a chorus here and they said we had been thinking about that and so we started at the princeton y a it was a joint program of both of them and i wanted to do these major works with orchestra so we started small and at the end of the first year i guess we had about thirty five forty singers but i wanted to you know to bach haydn those are things so i drew up a budget of how much it would cost to pay the instrumentalist and so forth for this and i went and presented it to the program director and she said well my goodness that is a bigger budget than our entire operating budget so that summer a group of us incorporated princeton pro music as a nonprofit dr brando has continued many of the choruses tradition including weekly rehearsals september through may each year community outreach performances concert tours and the annual re audition of corps members i'm looking for a whole bundle of things really listening for just the clarity of the voice is this a voice that's going to add to the sound of the ensemble at interesting color  at a particular amount of volume you know i'm always thinking of our sound in terms of color and them and the mixing of colors and the different sheens on the sound that i can get so all always notice an interesting vocal call or is this a voice that can move if you know meet the demands of let's say or handle is the voice and of course and then i will always be listening for this just going to be someone who's following along kind of floating around in the mix and i want to have a choir that has one hundred leaders and no followers so i'm trying to assess that that independence and that confidence  and that's why we do a bunch of different things in the in a first time audition with some some pitch things and sight reading range you know  for the two thousand and seventeen two thousand and eighteen season princeton premiers it has grown to one hundred ten voices saying your share a deep love for music and a commitment to achieve the best performances possible myself to process difficult feelings to to connect with with others to connect with myself i apparently can't help it i don't know yeah that's that stuff just comes out think because i have to i don't know what i would do if i didn't say it's just something like nothing else i do any other time in my life i love to do it sing with my kids sing with my family  sing in the shower hum along with songs in the car but there's nothing quite like singing with a group and it's something i just need to do for myself it's good for myself it's really an emotional piece for me it's also a third period piece i sometimes don't feel like going to ursula on tuesday night some life seems like it's just being impossible for whatever reasons and i because i love it it makes me feel beautiful and there is definitely something different about being part of a group than just singing a solo  you just enjoy music so much more when you can stand in the middle and hear all the different parts around you it's my favorite thing i love it feels good feels good emotional it feels good physically  it's interesting i can't imagine not s music as family it's my musical family being working with learning disabled children learning different children i don't really have that much of an opportunity to do well i think because i think that beauty needs to be a bigger part of our lives and when we have something that brings beauty and peace into our lives we are happier and i think the world is a better place and we have that so i think because of that beauty and peace that it brings to me and there's so much meaning in it i can think of past performances where i just had really profound experiences really feeling that connection with others feeling that connection with the music and the message of it feeling that connection with something so deeply personal meaningful and and that enriches my life so what p p m means to me and i i settled on the word family and that means a lot of things to a lot of people i think p p m has become a place where i come to do something that i love and i'm passionate about it's a place where i come to connect with friends it's a place where i go to meet new friends it's a place where i go to feel like what i'm  doing is is worth my while because it's making a difference in the community it's making a difference to the people who sing around me and you know i'm i'm affected in the same paternity to be surrounded by the incredibly beautiful music that we do to do something with a group of people who all have similar interest in music and specially choral music and made friends  when you're singing and it's like going to yoga class but creating music instead so i find that it really really brings me a lot of do i and a lot of balance and and a lot of meaning for me it's an outlet for experiencing the wonderful combination of a full orchestra and a full choir doing some of the most fantastic music that has ever been written and that is for me the big thrill that i get to tell for the opening concert of the two thousand and seventeen two thousand eight hundred season dr brando chose the german requiem by honest brown based on german language text from the lutheran bible in the apocrypha rather than the latin mass for the dead it is one of the most moving of all masterwork it the first time with francis not long after my mother had died which would have been in the late eighty's and it was really the bronx was really the first thing that brought me a real comfort remember correctly and we did brahms archigram that year that was my first experience with it so i'm really looking forward to doing it again and doing it with a different conductor and you know with a little more music under my belt as a little more seasoned singer at least once a season to do pieces that are taking us in that direction so that we can make these amazing phrases and thinking of you know the opening of the last movement for instance it just goes on forever and we wanted to be able to do that it also demands a degree of ensemble you know rhythmic togetherness that can be really hard to achieve because there's a lot going on with the orchestra and the choir and there's you know two against three and all that needs to be really in locked in and together so we've been building toward that and then i think it offers us so much to interpret in this beautiful collection of text that brahms put together and i spoke earlier about doors into a piece and i think that even just the imagery and in the brahms i think there's an image for everybody to to graham onto and love and i i wanted us to grow as a community of interpreters to the point where we could the all really get into the gro myself i really really love going to her so every week and being able to be part of a group that's making something so incredible