Hundreds enjoy Ralston College’s third annual seasonal choral concert
News 16th December 2024
Ralston College welcomed hundreds of local residents last Friday evening for a rousing performance of sacred and secular carols by a professional vocal consort, The Ralston Chorus and The Savannah Boys Choir.
The concert was the College’s third annual seasonal concert—and one among many musical performances the College hosts throughout each academic year.
Founding president Stephen Blackwood thanked guests for including Ralston College in their Christmas celebrations: “We are sincerely grateful for your presence here tonight.
“It has become a rare and even radical act, in our present time, to sit and contemplate the intense emotions and invisible realities that music so powerfully evokes,” he said.
“As we currently work through the 2025–26 admissions season, we look forward to populating another remarkable cohort of young scholars. In turn, we are grateful for your support and good wishes as we take the next steps on our arduous but joyous journey into the year that lies ahead.”
The performance, Winter Harmony, was conducted by acclaimed soprano Kristi Bryson who recently founded The Savannah Boys Choir.
Music and the humanities at Ralston College
Since the school’s launch of in-person learning on its campus in Savannah in 2022, music has been a central aspect of its public and academic programming.
Each of the three classes of Ralston College’s Master of Arts in the Humanities has included gifted musicians, instrumentalists, and vocalists. The class that will graduate in May 2025 includes a trumpeter, a Ukrainian folk musician, as well as many talented pianists and singers.
The success of The Ralston Chorus, which began in 2023, continues with a current group of several students and alumni. Together with the professional vocal ensemble and The Savannah Boys Choir, on Friday evening they performed The Holly and the Ivy, In the Bleak Midwinter, Carol of the Bells, and Jingle Bells. The program was supplemented with hymns, readings and poetry.
The evening also illuminated for local audiences a key aspect of Ralston College’s Master of Arts in the Humanities: the students’ mastery of Ancient Greek, which was showcased by the reading of a passage from the Gospel of Luke in its original language.
Each year, the academic curriculum—which examines the greatest works of philosophy, literature, and art from antiquity to the medieval period, and into the modern age—is guided by a theme. This year’s theme is Nature in the Western tradition: students are exploring how humans have sought, for millennia, to understand not just the natural world, but the essence of human nature itself.
“Far from being an abstract or obscure question, this is an urgent matter for our era: humanity, and the humanities, cannot heal again without comprehending the human spirit that gives them meaning and purpose,” President Blackwood said.
“Although the constituent elements of music—the human song, the vibrating strings, the resounding airwaves—can each be described as natural processes within the laws of science, the phenomenon of how they move each of us far transcends that realm: the effect of beautiful music on our bodies and souls can be sublime, and is, in a very real sense, supernatural.”
Ralston College’s free public concert series
In addition to seasonal concerts, in February 2024 Ralston College welcomed world-renowned musicians for a beautiful performance of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, featuring soprano Kristi Bryson, and mezzo-soprano Kim Leeds—soloists who have each toured extensively throughout North America and Europe—and conductor Dr Fr Robert Mehlhart, OP.
The performance, which brought together more than 180 guests for a contemplative journey through Baroque music's themes of suffering and redemption, was preceded by a lecture placing the performance in the chronology of Ralston College’s curriculum, and elaborating how polyphone rose out of plainchant in the West.
Dr Fr Mehlhart is the Director of Music and Organist at the Theatine Church in Munich, where he leads the Vokalkapelle, founded in 1482 as the choir to the Bavarian Royal Court. He is a former lecturer at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich, a composer of masses and motets, and a scholar of plainchant, also known as Gregorian chant.
Dr Fr Mehlhart first visited Ralston College in February 2022 to lead the College’s winter concert, Palestrina, Allegri, and Plainchant, for which he guided a vocal consort through an evening of Renaissance music featured major works by the great Roman composers Gregorio Allegri (Miserere mei, Deus) and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (Missa Emendemus), as well as the plainchant from which these works sprung.
Dr Fr Melhart will in February 2025 lead a concert, Works of Wonder: Mozart and Vivaldi, featuring Mozart's Exsultate Jubilate and Vivaldi's Cantata.
Alongside these events, Ralston College also partners with the Savannah Philharmonic for concerts from the balcony of Philbrick Eastman House in honor of a long-held tradition begun by entrepreneur and property owner Greg Parker.
In April 2024, Ralston student Ari Johnson played Bach and Handel on violin before a crowd of local residents, business owners and public officials who joined faculty, staff, and students for a ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate the expansion of Ralston College’s campus footprint with the opening of its administrative headquarters at 17 West McDonough on Chippewa Square.
Savannah Philharmonic performed from the same balcony in July 2024 as part of its “Phil the Neighborhoods” initiative, which aims to bring all genres of music to downtown parks and squares throughout the year.
More than 200 local residents and business owners turned out on a Sunday afternoon for the performance, which featured a brass quartet, drum set, and instrumentalists from across the state.
Generous support from the local Savannah community has helped make these series possible.
About Ralston College
Ralston College is in the midst of admitting students who, in Spring 2026. will make up the College’s fourth consecutive cohort to be admitted to their degree of Master of Arts in the Humanities.
The College’s intensive one-year graduate program, which traces the development of Western civilization from ancient times to the present, includes an eight-week term in Greece followed by three terms in Savannah, Georgia.
Ralston College is devoted to freedom of thought and speech, has no political or religious affiliations, and does not accept government funds.
Its mission is to revive the conditions of a free and flourishing culture by providing transformative, rigorous education in the humanities.
In addition to its degree program, the College also hosts a series of free, public lectures, which since its first academic year in 2022 has welcomed more than 1,500 guests.
To date, the College’s podcasts and online lectures—also available for free—have reached millions.
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