For students, Holidays at Hendricks is more than a concert, it’s a family

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As the Hendricks Chapel music ensembles held one last practice, artistic director José “Peppie” Calvar asked the performers to raise their hands if this event was their last Holidays at Hendricks performance.

As friends looked around the room to acknowledge those with their hands up, their expressions were bittersweet — the same sentiment that surrounded the event for many performers.

“Even though I won’t be performing in it again, I’ll always remember how it felt to perform in it,” Hendricks Chapel choir president Kaycie Romano said. “When I think about Holidays, I think about the feeling you get.”

This year, Holidays at Hendricks held two in-person shows Sunday. The shows featured the Syracuse University Symphony Orchestra, Hendricks Chapel Choir, Setnor Sonority, University Singers, Guitar Ensemble and Morton Schiff Jazz Ensemble. Within two days of registration opening for the event, its around 600 seats per show were taken, Calvar said.

A recording of one of the shows will be released on Dec. 10.

Holidays at Hendricks is one of the very few events of the year where all of the music ensembles perform together. Performers from different groups attend each other’s concerts and greet each other as they walk by on campus, but only at Holidays at Hendricks do they all occupy the same stage, Romano said.

The songs selected for the show represent holiday celebrations from a variety of cultures, with collaborative pieces created by composers with many different identities. The show aims to demonstrate the unique ways that holidays are celebrated.

“One of the things that I like the most about this is that an audience member is going to come and they can expect to hear and see quality, but they are not exactly sure what it is that they can expect to hear,” Calvar said.

For the individual ensemble featured performances, the directors of each ensemble choose one piece on their own. Calvar and his colleagues collaborated to decide which pieces would best highlight the sound from each ensemble — including one that Calvar composed himself, “O Magnum Mysterium.”

“Before I took this job 11 years ago, the holiday season was kind of a drudgery for me,” Calvar said. “My life completely changed and my perspective on this season and how we can bring the arts to people.”

As soon as the doors opened, lines of family, friends and faculty formed in multiple directions to see the annual performance. Grinning children ran up the chapel steps waiting to be greeted by its staff.

Romano, a senior and a violinist in the orchestra, participated in her fourth and last Holidays at Hendricks performance. One of the responsibilities of the chapel choir executive board and seniors is to light the audience’s candles before the last three songs of the program. It is something that everybody in the choir looks forward to before their senior year, Romano said.

“You can see the lights go out, we all have the candles and that’s the moment where all the graduating people start crying and you’re hugging your friends,” Romano said.

Through the event, Romano learned more about herself as a musician, but she has also grown to be amazed by the amount of collaboration, resources and time that goes into organizing an event at this scale.

“I hope part of my next chapter is coming back and being able to watch it because that’s the one way I haven’t been able to experience (Holidays at Hendricks) yet,” Romano said.

Romano aspires to be a music teacher and wants to create an experience similar to this one for her students, where they can feel the happiness, post-performance rush and pride that she felt afterward.

Preparation for Holidays at Hendricks begins months before the event, with multiple rehearsals every week. This year, the ensembles played many new pieces that surround themes of love, joy, peace, family and friends.

Some pieces stay the same year after year, but new songs are also introduced each year. The annual pieces, like “Silent Night” and “The Lord Bless You and Keep You,” are low preparation but are some of the most meaningful pieces in the show, Romano said.

Music graduate student Joseph Maxwell Ossei-Little, the inaugural Hendricks Chapel organ scholar, loves that the preparation process is all about people making mistakes, correcting them and always having fun doing it.

“I love that about Holidays at Hendricks. It’s fun, but at the same time, it’s still high stakes. We are able to balance between the two,” Ossei-Little said. “It’s not always all serious, even though we’re feeling stressed, we are able to enjoy it.”

Ossei-Little played an organ solo at this year’s performance. The solo was a challenge that he wanted to take on because the piece he chose to perform was technically complicated, including a portion where he used only his feet on the pedals and not his hands on the organ.

Over the last couple of days, it hit Ossei-Little that this would be his last time performing in Holidays at Hendricks. It is a bittersweet end, but a new beginning, he said. In the future, Ossei-Little plans to sit in the audience.

“I will always want to be a part of what it is because there’s always something very special,” Ossei-Little said. “But it also signals to me that at the end of everything is the beginning of a new thing.”