For most of the year, Blair musicians rehearse in familiar places on campus. They know the rooms, the acoustics, and usually what to expect when they start playing.
During Intersession, that changed completely.
This March, around 110 Blair students traveled to Italy as part of the school’s international music tour. Orchestra members and vocal students spent the trip performing, traveling, exploring different cities, and experiencing music in places very different from the ones they are used to at Blair.
The trip was part of Blair’s 2026 Intersession program, which gives students the chance to step outside their regular classes and spend time focusing on something different. For Blair’s musicians, that meant taking pieces they had practiced for months and performing them thousands of miles away from campus.
One of the biggest differences was simply the spaces we performed in.
At Blair, students are familiar with places like DuBois Theatre. In Italy, they had to adjust to completely different environments, including churches, cathedrals, and smaller performance spaces.
A piece that sounds one way in a rehearsal room can sound completely different inside a large cathedral. Sounds last longer. Students have to listen more carefully to each other. Singers and instrumentalists may need to change how they perform depending on the room.
That made every performance a little unpredictable.
Students were not only performing music in Italy. They were seeing the places, traditions, and history connected to some of the music they study at Blair.
Of course, the trip was not only about the concerts in the fascinating chapels.
Traveling with more than 100 classmates meant a lot of time on buses, at meals, walking through cities, and waiting around together. Students who might only normally see one another during orchestra or chorus suddenly spent most of the day together.
That gave people a chance to become closer to classmates they might not normally talk to very much on campus.
The group also visited places with connections to Blair’s own music faculty. In Florence, students visited the city where Director of Vocal Music Ryan Manni Brennan previously trained as an opera singer. We also traveled to Cremona, a city with a long musical history.
For me, seeing those places made the trip feel different from simply reading about music history in class.
There was also something exciting about taking something so familiar from Blair and seeing how it changed in another country.
The piece Gloria that had been rehearsed again and again on campus suddenly sounded different in Italy. A classmate you had known for months might become someone you actually got to know during a long bus ride. A normal school ensemble became a group representing Blair somewhere completely new.
By the end of the trip, students returned to campus with plenty of photos, stories, and probably a little less sleep.
But they also came back having experienced music in a way that would have been difficult to recreate in Blairstown.
For around one week, rehearsal moved far beyond Blair.
And for the students who went just as I, I hope Italy became part of the music too.
