Ten girls gather around the piano in the choir room during U-Lunch on Thursday, where music teacher Emma Castaldi plays the chords of Sara Bareilles’s “Kaleidoscope Heart.” Sheet music in hand, this intimate choir comprised of sopranos and altos rehearses, each member learning her part to create a collective sound. Crescendo, Parker’s first choir “specifically for female-identifying voices” in recent memory has been rehearsing since the beginning of the year.

Castaldi and senior Isabella Gomez-Barrientos, a Performing Arts Committee Head and member of Grape Jam, came together with the idea for the club last year. The concept is that it’s open to all — “experienced singers, shower singers, choir members, non-choir members,” Castaldi wrote in an inviting email — to make the all-female space available to students beyond those enrolled in New Chorale or Special Chorus. According to Gomez-Barrientos, around 80% of members have a background in singing. They perform songs that are primarily by women and contain empowering messages.

“Yes, we want to be a really good sounding group,” Gomez-Barrientos said, “but the thing about singing in a choir is that it’s not focused on the individual, it’s focused on the group. It’s not about having the most gifted people but the message that we’re unified.”

Sophomore Crescendo member Sammi Coleman appreciates being a part of the group. “Since everyone chooses to go during lunch, everyone genuinely wants to be there,” Coleman said. “Everyone’s committed to it. I hope, over the course of the year, that I get closer to the people who are in it.” 

To Gomez-Barrientos, Crescendo serves an important role in the school following the controversy that unfolded after last year’s Gender Week. “I just felt like that was a time when the women here were silenced,” she said. “For me, music is an outlet I use when I’m frustrated. When I feel like I can’t speak, I sing. ‘Crescendo’ means the music gets louder, and that’s what the female students at this school need to do. How else are we going to be heard?”

Castaldi also recognizes the empowering quality of all-female choirs, a perspective which stems from her previous experience leading an acapella group, Wave, at another high school. “In Wave, these girls just sang like they’d never sung before because they felt comfortable surrounded by other women in the room,” Castaldi said. “It was really powerful to see, and we talked about how to take the confidence from this space out into the rest of the world.” Lacking a similar experience since leaving that school, Castaldi was motivated to bring the idea to Parker.  

Gomez-Barrientos, too, drew inspiration from her experiences, specifically her summers at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, in starting Crescendo. “It was all female identifying women on this piece of land, for three weeks, just jamming out to music, made by women, for women. I grew up with women being shown as this powerful force to be reckoned with. It was just a big part of my life and I wanted to share it with the school.” 

Crescendo plans to perform at Vespers and the spring concert. Gomez-Barrientos said, “At these concerts, it would be great to show the younger girls in the school that this could be you someday.”