Good Question (GQ) — one of the College’s all-gender a cappella groups — held its 29th anniversary reunion concert last Saturday. As the group’s 25th reunion in 2020 did not take place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, GQ and its alums organized this reunion to make up for the planned festivities. The concert featured performances from the current group as well as three groups of alums divided by graduation year. They closed with a group performance in which current and former GQ members sang The Mamas & The Papas’ “California Dreamin” and Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs.”
After the pandemic forced the group to cancel its last reunion, GQ alums began coordinating with the College to plan a make-up event. The planning committee responsible for putting the event together consisted of seven to eight alums ranging from the Classes of 1998 to 2020. “We’ve been planning it for about a year,” Hannah Gruendemann ’20 told the Record.
“We’d have monthly calls to discuss all the things that needed to be done and different people would work on different parts of it,” GQ co-founder Bryan Frederick ’98 told the Record. “From talking to the [Alumni Engagement Office] to getting all the food, setting up the rehearsal spaces and planning which songs we’re going to do and the arrangements — it was definitely a big group effort.”
“Half a year ago, it was like, ‘Wow, we’re doing a lot for something that feels really far out,’” Gruendemann added. “But once we got here, it was so wonderful to see people I haven’t seen in four or five years who were huge parts of my time at Williams. We had a really fun time.”
Beyond the opportunity for GQ alums to reconnect with group members they knew during their time at the College, the reunion concert also allowed different generations of GQ singers to see how the a cappella group has evolved over the years. “I think a lot of us were like, ‘Wait, maybe we should have tried to be this funny during our time!’” Gruendemann said of the older alums. “I don’t know if we could have been this funny.”
Frederick also emphasized that music teacher Daniel Potter ’16 played a crucial role in bringing the performances together. “He played a really pivotal role in making good use of our rehearsal time, teaching everybody everything in a way that they can absorb it quickly,” Frederick said.
This concert was not only an opportunity to compensate for the one originally planned for 2020 — it also allowed alums for the Class of 2020 to make up for the experiences they missed due to the pandemic, including performances of their senior solos. “The Class of 2020 alums never got to do their senior solos,” Gigi Gamez ’22 told the Record. “In a cappella, your senior solo is just such a big thing, so it was really rough. So, instead of doing old songs that our group had done before, we decided to do the senior solos that they never got to do. It was really special to finally get that performance and complete this chapter.”
GQ isn’t the only campus a cappella group that had alum events interrupted by COVID. The Ephlats will celebrate its 65th anniversary with a reunion next year to compensate for its 60th anniversary, which was interrupted by the pandemic, according to Ephlats President Josh Kirschner ’24. Still, a cappella groups have found other ways to keep alums together. Ephlats alums regularly return to the College to tailgate together on Homecoming, and according to The Williams Octet co-president Karthik Subbiah ’24, every five years Octet alums return to the College for Homecoming (in 2022, a third of their living alums returned for the event).
With the 29th reunion concert behind them and ties between alums and current members remaining strong, Frederick is already looking forward to the next opportunity to perform with the full lineage of GQ members. “[I want to add] just how grateful all the [alums] are for the current students for hosting us,” Frederick said. “It all still feels like a community between the alums in the current students and we’re excited to continue this and start thinking about the next reunion.”
[Editor’s note: Shane Stackpole, who is the executive editor of arts for the Record and a current member of GQ, was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.]
