If you have walked past the Lang Music Building on a summer afternoon, you’ve probably heard it: the unmistakable sound of children’s voices rising in harmony. For the past 32 years, that sound has been cultivated by John Alston, the founder, executive, and artistic director of the Chester Children’s Chorus (CCC). This August, Alston will retire, marking the end of an era for a program that has woven itself into the fabric of both Swarthmore College and the neighboring city of Chester, PA.
It might be easy, hearing the history of the CCC, to imagine its founder as a certain kind of figure: the visionary architect, the charismatic leader, the man with a plan who, three decades ago, set out to build something extraordinary. Imagining someone who created a program that has drawn national attention for its blend of musical excellence and academic rigor, you might picture someone formal, certain, maybe even a little distant — the kind of person who speaks in mission statements and legacy.
But when you sit down with Alston, he immediately pushes back on the mythology.
“‘Founding’ is quite the exaggeration,” he said with a chuckle, recounting the CCC’s origin in 1994. Back then, he was a young, insecure music professor at Swarthmore, terrified in his first jazz history class with 70 students: “I had no business trying to teach anything, except chorus.” Inspired by his own childhood experience in a Newark boys’ choir, where 60 boys from the city rehearsed three hours a day, six days a week, he had a dream: he would go into Chester and start a boys’ choir, and they would sing Bach cantatas.
“I had this completely uninformed impulse,” he admitted. “I had no training with music education, [and] no teaching experience.” He approached a Chester principal and asked for a group of boys to make up his inaugural chorus. That spring, he found seven. Borrowing a van from what is now the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility — which he did with no background check (“This is pre-Sandusky [a former Penn State coach convicted of child sexual abuse],” he noted) — he drove around Chester, getting lost on numbered streets cut off by train tracks and broken bridges. “All this,” he reflected, “is a metaphor for something, but I have no idea what it all meant.”
He brought the boys to campus. They couldn’t sing at all.
“I had no idea how to teach seven boys who had never sung in a choir before,” he remembered. But, miraculously, it didn’t matter whether or not the boys could sing because something else happened: “We recognized each other immediately. We loved each other immediately. We laughed, we teased each other constantly. Music was just an excuse for us to be together.” Within three weeks, they were hanging out at his house, watching movies: “We were definitely a family. I was their crazy uncle for sure.”
From those original seven boys, the program has grown to serve hundreds of children from Chester, providing year-round musical training and intensive math education. When asked how he defines success, Alston’s answer was layered. Musically, it’s about building fluency. He wants his students to be “bi-cultural”: to move seamlessly between the music of their community and the “culture of power,” whether that’s Mozart’s Requiem or The Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” “It’s not that one is better,” he stressed. “I want them on stage being cheered for what they know and love … But there’s a world beyond Chester.”
Academically, the mission is urgent. Alston pointed to census data showing that around 40% of Chester’s children live in poverty: “In this country, shame on us, right? That shouldn’t be happening right now.” The chorus’s math tutoring aims to be a counterweight.
“I tell people ‘We’re good at music, and we’re better at math,’” he stated. “But we have to make more progress.” He spoke of the challenge of closing the opportunity gap with a sobering frankness. Every year, studying twice a week, the children make about a year’s worth of progress. “It’s not enough,” he declared, “They have to make a year and a half’s worth of progress to catch up.” His ultimate goal is stark: “I want my children to work with your grandchildren, not for them.”
When asked about the hardest part of this work, Alston’s voice softened: “Three of those guys [from the first class] are dead. One was murdered: drugs. His younger brother just passed away last year: cancer. He lived with me for a semester. I became his legal guardian.” He paused. “We fought about doing homework. I just would not get off that guy. It was the first time in his life that he had passed all of his classes. He got Bs or better at Strathaven Middle School. But then he quit the choir, started dealing like his older brother. He was in jail twice. And then he died of cancer.” Another died in a car accident, not wearing a seatbelt.
“Not everybody knows that,” he admitted. “In fact, if you write about those three boys, it will be the first time that it’s ever been in print.”
For Alston, this is the weight that underlies the standing ovations. The chorus cannot fix everything. “Eradicating poverty in Chester? Can’t do that,” he said plainly. He cannot claim with certainty that the program changes long-term trajectories: “That’s correlation, not causation, and the correlation is not strong enough for us to claim lifelong outcomes.”
What he can claim is this: thousands of hours spent together over a ten-year career in the chorus, and the joy and confidence those hours build. The 75-to-100 standing ovations a child might experience. “That feels as good as winning a meet,” he said, turning to me: “You swim so that you can do the hard stuff. Swimming is not the hard stuff. That’s the easy part. You swim so that you are fortified enough to revise your paper. That’s why we sing.”
Alston’s hopes for the future are ambitious. He envisions a day-school model, with enough resources to see the children at least ten hours a week. He wants 10% of his students to attend elite colleges, 50% to attend “really, really good schools,” and the rest to attend trade schools, “so they have a shot at the American dream.” He estimates it would take about $3 million a year to build that kind of program.“I have no idea where I got that number from,” he admits, “I cannot back that up with anything.”
What he does know is what the work has taught him. “I was such a selfish, insecure musician when I came to Swarthmore. I thought music was the most important thing in the world. It’s not. Do they need Mozart’s Requiem to have a good life? No, of course you don’t need that.” He gestured toward me: “Do you know Mozart’s Requiem? No? You’re doing alright. You’re having a good life.”
But the moments, the thousands of moments, when a child’s face lights up discovering harmony, when they stop the show with sustained applause, and when they not only learn something they didn’t know but also eventually learn to love it, too — those moments are worth something. “I have no idea what,” he admitted, “but something.”
When I asked what he wanted his legacy to be, Alston didn’t hesitate. “I want to be remembered as one of the guys who showed the world that our children are beautiful, too. With love, humor, and a good plan, our children will flourish, too. That’s what you had, man. Love. Somebody in your family was funny. They certainly loved you. And they had a good or great plan. And so here you are.”As he prepares to step down, Alston leaves behind a chorus that has proven his point for three decades. For three of the chorus’s original seven boys, their time in the program was brief, but during that time, however short, they got to experience something different. They got to be part of a family. They got to stand on a stage and be cheered. They got to feel what it meant to belong to something beautiful. For the hundreds who have come since, that same possibility endures. The music will continue, and so will the math. But the foundation, as it always has been, is love.
