On Thursday, April 18, the Knightingals and UKnighted club choirs hosted a joint concert to end their performing seasons. 

Knightingals opened the night with six songs. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” opened the night, followed by “Down By The River To Pray.” Following “Down By The River…”, the choir performed “Put Your Records On,” which featured spaces for each of the members to perform a brief solo. Longtime Knightingals member Gwendolyn Fulkerson mentioned “Put Your Records On” as a particular highlight, saying that “it’s really great that Knightingals… doesn’t have a main soloist for the song. Instead, it’s broken up into smaller parts so you get to hear from multiple people.” Fulkerson further said that hearing different interpretations from different people as part of a cohesive whole builds “something greater than the sum of its parts, which I think is really fun.”

After “Put Your Records On,” Knightingals performed “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” followed by an energetic take on “Lollipop” which included members of the choir throwing candy into the audience, drawing appreciative laughs and shouts from the crowd. The choir ended their portion of the performance with a reflective performance of “Edelweiss,” which Fulkerson singled out as being “very meaningful.” Fulkerson said that the nostalgia of the song made it powerful, and said that “especially for us seniors, [it’s] very fitting for our last concert.”

After Knightingals finished their portion of the show, UKnighted took the stage for the second half of the night. They opened their show with a reprise of a song they had performed in the fall — “Sh-Boom (Life Could Be A Dream).” This was followed by “God Is On Our Side.” According to Lucas Postuma, the leader of UKnighted, the choir learned the song in an hour before he arrived at rehearsal one night. “This Is The Moment” was next, which Postuma mentioned as a highlight. Postuma said that “This Is The Moment” was a “particularly ambitious song,” saying that the range of the piece is particularly demanding and that the choir put in a lot of work on their vocal tone to make it successful. 

After “This Is The Moment,” the choir performed “Autumn Leaves,” another reprise from the fall, and then the choir opened the stage to its members for solos. Most members of the choir performed solos, with some drawing laughs from the audience (“Mi Cola”) and others being more reflective (“Perfect,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “If”). The night continued with “Danny Boy” and “Doxology,” and ended with “Country Roads” and UKnighted’s traditional closer of “Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby,” complete with theatrical and enthusiastic enactments of the lyrics.

Postuma and Fulkerson both emphasized the significance the choirs hold to them. Postuma said that “It’s a special thing to be able to lead a group of young men … in a music making style that’s important to them,” and added that he felt it was a “really good opportunity” to “cultivate the leadership and collaboration skills of people in the choir, and [cultivate] their music-making ability.” Fulkerson mentioned that the presence of extracurricular club choirs at Calvin provides a “very low judgment, very collaborative choir environment, where I still get to enjoy making music with cool people, but I don’t have the pressure of grades,” and added that the extracurricular nature of the choir removes some of the “weightiness of having a grade,” which made being in a club choir “very freeing.”