John Alston turns kids in hoodies into a choral band of brothers

By Mary Beth McCauley,

Chester, Pa. — Even if they don’t sing a single note of music
as adults, the performers in the Chester Children’s Chorus will
make a difference in the world.

Of that much their founding director is convinced.

After all, his own participation in the Newark (N.J.) Boys
Chorus opened a new world to the young John Alston when his home
life was bleak and his father an alcoholic. Why not do the same for
others?

So in 1994, Dr. Alston, associate professor of music at
Swarthmore College, just outside Philadelphia, invited seven
children to come sing with him on the bucolic campus. They were
from nearby Chester, Pa., an impoverished city struggling against
economic decline, its schools burdened with high dropout rates and
abysmal academic achievement.

The seven children were the forerunners of what now includes the
coed, 120-voice Chester Children’s Chorus (CCC); a full-day summer
program at Swarthmore; a new public-private Chester Upland School
of the Arts; and formal musical instruction for public school
students throughout Chester.

[Editor’s note: The original version of the paragraph above
indicated that the Chester Fund for Education and the Arts and the
Chester Children’s Chorus were related. They are two separate
organizations, though Dr. Alston founded and heads both.]

Ultimately Alston wants membership in a chorus like CCC to be
available to every child in Chester.

Gathered one recent frigid Thursday evening for study, supper,
and song, the members of the chorus’s young men’s division took
their places at long tables inside an icicle-covered Chester
Friends Meeting house and cracked their schoolbooks.