School’s Choir Rises Up Singing

Three years ago, the tiny nine-member choir at Dorsey High School was unpolished, suffering from bare-bones training, shunned by students in the popular school cliques.

Now it is a powerhouse, 33 strong, whose students will sing tonight on stage at Carnegie Hall.

Most of the teenagers don’t know how to read music, but they will perform Dvorak’s “Te Deum,” in Latin. Many come from poor neighborhoods or broken families or group homes -- or all three. Some boarded their first plane and left their state for the first time when they headed to New York on Wednesday morning.

“This is just like the top of the mountain, I tell you,” said Marilyn Payne, the choir’s musical director since 2003. An intense, stubborn woman, she cajoled, pestered and came close to threatening in her relentless effort to raise more than $30,000 for her choir’s trip.

The story of the South Los Angeles choir is spreading this week as television stations showcase the singing students and people cheer them as they would a winning team on the way to a title.

“I’m a Dorsey grad, Class of ‘91, and I am so excited,” said security supervisor Latanya Collins, 32, of Los Angeles, as she waited in line Wednesday at a Long Beach espresso stand.

“I called my sister at 5:30 in the morning yesterday -- I was watching the news, she was sleeping -- and I said, ‘Oh, my God, girl, Dorsey is going to Carnegie Hall!’ ”

Those who hear about the concert keep asking how it happened.

As in most real-life transformations, there was no simple formula, no magic bullet.

But change slowly came to Room E-10, where, every other day, from 8 to 9:50 a.m., Payne and her assistant director, Rod Hines, taught the teenagers scales and four-part harmony while insisting that they behave and keep their grades high.

Some of the teenagers grew up singing in their church choirs. Others had never before sung regularly. Few knew the difference between major and minor chords. The music most familiar to them was hip-hop, rap and “other forms,” as Hines phrases it, “that are not tone-friendly.”

Payne and Hines taught with whatever worked -- hymns and spirituals, classical choral pieces and songs the teenagers were listening to on the radio.

“I had some kids who were tone-deaf. I had to teach them,” Hines said. So he used Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You” to teach chords, and the rollicking hymn “Poor Man Lazarus” to explicate octaves.

Less tangible were the lessons on how to blend voices harmoniously, putting ego and bravado aside.

Their first big breakthrough came last spring when they traveled to Utah for a choir competition, winning a “superior” rating and catching the attention of Paul A. Smith. A Dorsey graduate who is the director of choral music at Cal State Northridge, Smith was struck not only by the teenagers’ talent but also by their attitude.

“I will tell you, I was so proud of those kids. They were on the edge of their chairs. They were listening. And then they did a good job,” he said.

Smith soon told others.

In September, the invitation came. The choir was asked to sing at Carnegie Hall as part of an annual series of top school choir concerts organized by Mid-America Productions.

Their concert tonight, with three other area choirs -- from Calabasas, Agoura Hills and Northridge -- will feature, in addition to Dvorak’s “Te Deum,” a “Te Deum” in English by contemporary British composer John Rutter. Smith will direct.

Tonight’s program is intimidating for a choir more comfortable with lively gospel pieces that let them sway and clap.

So this week, as television crews hovered to film them rehearsing, they sang the rousing James Weldon Johnson piece, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Among the lyrics: “Let our rejoicing rise, High as the list’ning skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.”

As soon as the cameras left, Hines got down to business on Rutter’s “Te Deum,” perched on a high stool behind the piano and striking keys with one hand while directing with the other.

Most students sat up straight, their faces serious, absorbed in rehearsing. Some had memorized the piece, but others still clutched the maroon-covered folders close to their faces.

Hines made the tenors sing the same line over and over, then the altos, then the sopranos.

The piece was smooth, but not smooth enough. Some sopranos went shrill on the high notes of “everlasting glory.” Hines cut them off.

“Sopranos, I need you to round that out and warm it up. It sounds great. But it needs to stop being so piercing,” he said. The next day, he stopped them on the same phrase, ordering them to go home and listen to Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price.

Although the students have sung in French and Samoan, the Dvorak “Te Deum,” which the composer wrote in 1892 for his first Carnegie Hall performance, marked their first foray into Latin. Some said they liked the music but struggled with the words.

“It’s hard. It’s not my language,” complained soprano Olivia McKinstry, 15, who prefers the Rutter piece. But they sing the Latin words precisely and clearly: “Pleni sunt caeli et terra maiestatis gloriae tuae.”

Teaching the teenagers the music was one thing. The bigger challenge was the money.

Their families were in no position to pay $1,500, the price of sending one student to New York. Payne struggled and failed at first to jump-start fundraising.

She showed up at a KABC-TV public outreach session and challenged the station to cover her choir, which she called “a bright spot in the community.” The station began airing regular reports, and letters started arriving with checks from $1 to $1,000, many of them from Dorsey graduates.

But even last month, the money wasn’t all there. Then Dale Petrulis, director of partnerships at the Los Angeles Unified School District, contacted the much wealthier Manhattan Beach Unified School District, whose Mira Costa High School choir was also about to sing at Carnegie Hall.

Mira Costa student musicians invited the Dorsey choir to sing at their send-off concert and then donated part of the proceeds to Dorsey, helping close the gap.

Payne, meanwhile, thought through all the things her singers might need but might not own. With some of the donations, she shopped for dress shirts, vests and bow ties for her students, visiting three Payless shoe stores to buy matching black shoes for her sopranos and altos.

Singing has always been central to Payne, who was born into a family of musicians. From early childhood in Franklinton, La., she sang and played piano before deciding that teaching music was her calling.

She taught for three decades at several Los Angeles middle schools before moving to Dorsey. But when asked how Dorsey improved so much in three years, she didn’t cite lesson plans but said, “This is just orchestrated by God.”

The students appear to be full of wonder about it too.

“It seems unreal. I really didn’t think we’d be going. Really,” said Devion Jelkes, 17, whose tenor voice is so rich that when he sings Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come,” adults tear up and his fellow singers applaud.

Devion’s mother describes how her son loves music and has sung at church for years. But he lacked a certain self-confidence, in part because he is shorter than his brother and many classmates, she said. That’s changed, she said.

Devion cuts a stylish figure in class in his earrings and well-tailored suit coats purchased for him by his grandmother at second-hand shops.

He said he initially was reluctant to join the choir two years ago because other students didn’t respect it. Now they do, and he wants to go to music school next year and become a professional singer, probably in gospel and R&B.;

“When I sing, I feel people are being touched, so it touches me,” he said. “Knowing that people are being touched makes me want to keep going.”