In late April, the middle school choir Vivace traveled to Anaheim for the Heritage Music Festival, where it earned third place among the six junior high and high school choral ensembles. Vivace earned high marks from the professors at the festival, who commented on the musicality in their performance. The ensemble also was invited to the 2015 Festival of Gold in San Francisco, an honor reserved only for groups that are rated 90 or higher. To celebrate, the group visited Disneyland the following day. “It was a blast!” said Dave Hart, middle school music teacher and Vivace director.
When Amira Valliani ’06 recently had her photo taken with President Obama, she never expected it to become a Harker Quarterly cover shot. Now the photo has made Harker Quarterly history – marking the first time a graduate has graced the magazine’s cover.
Published four times a year, Harker Quarterly showcases some of the top news, leading programs, inspiring people and visionary plans of the greater Harker community. We mail it to current families and alumni, and post to our account at issuu.com for all to enjoy.
Valliani recently wrapped up her duties as senior adviser to the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications at the White House. During her stint there, Valliani worked on a range of foreign policy, press and public diplomacy issues. Of her photo with President Obama, she said “It was taken in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia before a town hall with young people from across Southeast Asia as a part of the launch of the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI), which I coordinated. My boss introduced me to the president backstage before the event started and told him I put the initiative together.”
That event was actually Valliani’s last day on the job. “So the president and I chatted for a few minutes about the initiative and my plans for after the White House,” added Valliani who previously worked in the Office of the Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton. In that position, she served as special assistant to the State Department’s deputy chief of staff and wrote speeches for Secretary Clinton.
When not working (or posing with the world’s most powerful politician), Valliani enjoys running. This past spring, she ran in the Boston Marathon in an effort to raise money for the Aga Khan Foundation, one of the world’s largest international development organizations. “Our team of three runners successfully raised over $60,000,” she reported.
Valliani recently packed up her apartment in Washington, D.C., and backpacked around Myanmar (Burma) with fellow alumna Mina Lee ’06. She is spending the remainder of the summer traveling throughout Southeast Asia and Europe. Come fall, she will attend graduate school at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
In early May, the kindergarten classes of Katie Florio, Kimberly Sandoval, Michelle Anderson and Katherine Chi each performed a special show for morning audiences titled “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.”
Inspired by the popular children’s song of the same name, the show featured kindergarten students dressed up as different animals, each helping their friend Da Bear in his journey over the mountain. The show was directed by music teacher Carena Montany and choreographed by dance teacher Gail Palmer. With each class putting on a separate show, every student got to sing, dance and help carry forward the bear’s efforts to climb the mountain with its friends’ help. The cuteness factor, with all the little ones dressed in furry animal costumes, was off the meter!
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Harker singers from the lower, middle and upper schools gathered at San Jose’s Mexican Heritage Plaza Theater on April 1 for this year’s United Voices concert. Kellie Binney-Smart led the Bucknall Choir in the night’s opening performance of W.B. Yeats’ “The Sally Gardens,” set to music by Benjamin Britten, before moving on to Bret McKenzie’s “Life’s a Happy Song” from “The Muppets.”
Dazzling performances by the middle school groups followed, with highlights including Dynamics’ rendition of Kirby Shaw’s “Happiness Is …,” led by Mary Ellen Agnew-Place; a performance of Duke Ellington and Don George’s “Hit Me With a Hot Note” by the grades 7-8 show choir Harmonics, directed by Agnew-Place and Monica Colletti; and Vivace’s version of the Phillip Phillips hit “Home,” directed by Dave Hart.
Meanwhile, upper school introductory choir Bel Canto, directed by Jennifer Sandusky, delighted the audience with a medley of Brazilian folk songs and the Susan Nace-directed intermediate vocal ensemble Camerata sang “Dirait-on” from “Les Chansons de Roses.” Female vocal group Cantilena, also directed by Nace, displayed its multicultural talents with versions of Debussy’s “Nuits d’étoiles” and “Dravidian Dithyramb” by Victor Paranjoti. Soon after, Downbeat, codirected by Sandusky and Laura Lang-Ree, showed up to bring the house down, concluding with the Jason Mraz hit “I’m Yours/Over the Rainbow.”
As has become tradition, the show ended with all of the night’s singers assembled onstage for a special closing number, singing “O Sifuni Mungu” by David Maddux.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Numerous lower school musical groups performed at this year’s Spring Music Concert, held May 8 at the Bucknall Theater. Spanning many genres and time periods, the concert featured notable performances from the Lower School Orchestra, Lower School Jazz Ensemble, Bucknall Choir and more, with a special appearance by the Guitar Group, which performed a classical guitar piece by Ferdinando Carulli, then skipped ahead a few centuries to play Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
The concert also featured several stand-out solo performances from Harker students, including Maya Franz, grade 5, who performed the Dave Brubeck staple “Take Five,” and original compositions by Theodore Kratter, grade 1, Angeline Kiang, grade 4, and Paul Kratter and Anika Fuloria, both grade 5.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
This year’s lower school dance concert, titled “T.V. Time!” had students moving to the music of classic television shows from multiple eras. Songs were suggested by lower school faculty and staff, and the chosen songs were choreographed by our great faculty dance team!
Students danced to songs from iconic shows such as “Hawaii Five-O,” “The Simpsons, “Friends” and “Modern Family,” with each routine paying homage to the settings and characters from each show. Technical director Danny Dunn provided voice-overs and slideshow images relevant to the shows to which the production paid tribute.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Neon, stone-washed denim and gallons of hairspray made a temporary comeback during the Harker Conservatory’s spring musical, “The Wedding Singer,” which played at the Blackford Theater in late April.
Mid-‘80s New Jersey was the setting for this lovable romantic comedy, directed by Laura Lang-Ree. Happy-go-lucky wedding singer Robbie (Ian Richardson, grade 12) goes from ecstatic to crestfallen when his longtime girlfriend Linda (Caroline Howells, grade 11) unceremoniously dumps him at the altar with a note. The resulting comedy drew plenty of laughs, as well as “oohs” and “ahhs” for the Katie O’Bryon choreographed musical sequences, not to mention “awws” for its heartfelt emotional center.
Set against the ostentatious backdrop of the 1980s, “The Wedding Singer” employed many nods to the culture of the decade. The musical’s score, fittingly filled with touches of synth pop and new wave, was wonderfully played by The Wedding Singer band, directed by Catherine Snider.
As with every major performing arts production, the student crew proved invaluable.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Neon, stone-washed denim and gallons of hairspray made a temporary comeback during the Harker Conservatory’s spring musical, “The Wedding Singer,” which played at the Blackford Theater in late April.
Mid-‘80s New Jersey was the setting for this lovable romantic comedy, directed by Laura Lang-Ree. Happy-go-lucky wedding singer Robbie (Ian Richardson, grade 12) goes from ecstatic to crestfallen when his longtime girlfriend Linda (Caroline Howells, grade 11) unceremoniously dumps him at the altar with a note. The resulting comedy drew plenty of laughs, as well as “oohs” and “ahhs” for the Katie O’Bryon choreographed musical sequences, not to mention “awws” for its heartfelt emotional center.
Set against the ostentatious backdrop of the 1980s, “The Wedding Singer” employed many nods to the culture of the decade. The musical’s score, fittingly filled with touches of synth pop and new wave, was wonderfully played by The Wedding Singer band, directed by Catherine Snider.
As with every major performing arts production, the student crew proved invaluable.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Neon, stone-washed denim and gallons of hairspray made a temporary comeback during the Harker Conservatory’s spring musical, “The Wedding Singer,” which played at the Blackford Theater in late April.
Mid-‘80s New Jersey was the setting for this lovable romantic comedy, directed by Laura Lang-Ree. Happy-go-lucky wedding singer Robbie (Ian Richardson, grade 12) goes from ecstatic to crestfallen when his longtime girlfriend Linda (Caroline Howells, grade 11) unceremoniously dumps him at the altar with a note. The resulting comedy drew plenty of laughs, as well as “oohs” and “ahhs” for the Katie O’Bryon choreographed musical sequences, not to mention “awws” for its heartfelt emotional center.
Set against the ostentatious backdrop of the 1980s, “The Wedding Singer” employed many nods to the culture of the decade. The musical’s score, fittingly filled with touches of synth pop and new wave, was wonderfully played by The Wedding Singer band, directed by Catherine Snider.
As with every major performing arts production, the student crew proved invaluable.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Abigail Joseph, middle school computer science teacher, has been very busy! In mid-May, she attended the Making Possibilities Workshop, held at Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara. The event was geared toward helping public educators and those working with low-income youth, and covered various formal and informal approaches to teaching on a variety of topics. She also spent several weeks working with Harker students for this year’s Technovation Challenge, a competition for young women in technology.
Joseph also traveled to Nashville in March for the national conference of the National Society of Black Engineers. There, she worked with the Bay Area, New York and Memphis chapters of Black Girls Code, an organization dedicated to fostering coding skills in young women of color. Joseph teamed up with Black Girls Code to deliver mobile app development workshops for nearly 200 middle and high school students. She also worked with a company called Hidden Level Games to hold a game jam workshop.
That same month, she headed to southern Texas to train a team of Latina middle school girls to develop an app idea that was a winner in this year’s Verizon App Innovation Challenge.