Wareham Middle School chorus club to start Sept. 24
The halls of Wareham Middle School will soon echo with more than just children’s laughter.
Jeffrey Gately, an English teacher at the school, will lead the new choral club after school every Thursday, beginning Sept. 24. Gately graduated from the Berklee College of Music but admitted leading a chorus club is new territory for him.
“I know how to sing, but I don’t know chorus,” Gately said. “I am used to … a hard rock band, but now I am doing chorus. Do I have to watch ‘Glee’, or ‘Pitch Perfect’?”
Gately said he is looking forward to “modernizing” the idea of a chorus. He said he doesn’t want the chorus to become “the old lady at the piano,” and wants to keep the audience’s interest.
“I have been attending chorus [recitals], and I always notice it’s a song too long,” Gately said. “I would rather keep it short and good.”
Gately plans to include some songs by Woody Guthrie, the Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but he would also like to open it up to what the students would like to sing. He said he is “even willing to accommodate positive, appropriate hip-hop.”
The last thing he wants to do, he said, is bore the students.
“What I think is hip may be disastrous or just not hip!” Gately said. “If I am left alone to drive it, and [the students] are shy, it’s just going to be Beatles and [The Rolling] Stones, my friend.”
The chorus club begins Thursday, Sept. 24 after school. Any interested students should talk to or email Gately at jgately@wareham.k12.ma.us.