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12/07/2016 07:30 AMIt’s not surprising to see Barbara Quinn dressed in formal black robes—after all, she served for some 20 years as a judge, rising to the position of chief court administrator. But this December, Barbara will be wearing black for a different reason. She is a member of the Con Brio Choral Society that is presenting its annual Christmas concerts on Friday and Sunday, Dec. 9 and 11, at Christ the King Church in Old Lyme. (Along the long black skirt, to mark the holiday season, the female members of Con Brio wear red tops.)
Barbara has sung with Con Brio, an auditioned, classical chorus that rehearses each Tuesday at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Old Saybrook, for eight years. The choral group itself is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The upcoming concert will highlight selections from Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio,” featuring the chorus along with soloists and orchestra. In the second half of the concert, a varied selection of holiday music, the singers arrange themselves around the audience rather than on risers at the front, giving a different auditory perspective.
Barbara, a Chester resident, is a second alto, sometimes adding that she is a second alto heading toward tenor.
“It’s the level of the voice; I sing low,” she explains.
Con Brio is not the first group Barbara has sung with. She started as a child at St. Ann’s church in Old Lyme and later sang in college, but then took a very long pause through law school and raising her two, now-adult children. In the mid-l990s, she returned to singing, with a number of Connecticut groups including Cappella Cantorum, the Hartford Chorale, and the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Chorus, often at the encouragement of her good friend, the late Joan Matz of Chester. She also participated in the Berkshire Choral Festival, a weeklong summer workshop for serious choral singers that culminates in performances not only in this country, but abroad as well. With the group, Barbara sang Beethoven’s “Mass in C” at Canterbury Cathedral in England. The church, famous as the site of the murder in the Middle Ages of Thomas Beckett in 1170, still burns an eternal flame in his honor.
The concert at which Barbara performed was in the evening and as the fading light filtered through the cathedral windows behind the singers and the flame of the eternal light glowed, Barbara remembers her reaction.
“It gave me the shivers,” she says.
With the Oratorio Society of New York, Barbara also traveled to China for a concert performing in Beijing’s Forbidden City. It was, in fact, travel that originally brought her to Con Brio, She joined at the urging of a friend who wanted her as a roommate when the group made one of its summer tours abroad. The singing tours have worked well not only for Barbara, but also for her husband, a retired college professor—but for a different reason.
“This is good for me, because my husband doesn’t like to travel,” she explains.
At Con Brio, Barbara has been a member of the board as well as being responsible for preparing notes for concert programs. In researching music, her native language, German, is often useful. Barbara was born in the north German city of Kiel and came to this country at the age of 7. Her parents first settled in Charlestown, Rhode Island and a year later moved to Old Lyme. She knew no English when first attended school, but within a half year, was speaking fluently.
“You know how children are,” she says.
As teenagers, Barbara and her two older brothers were sent back to Germany for several years of school. She returned for her senior year of high school, determined to take calculus. At that time, however, calculus was not a subject generally taught at the high school level. Barbara found one school where it was available, Norwich Free Academy, from which she graduated before attending Bryn Mawr on a full scholarship.
When her children were small, Barbara contemplated her next career move. She tutored and volunteered as a Cub Scout leader before deciding that teaching would not be right for her.
“I found I had favorites and a teacher has to be even-handed,” she recalls.
Instead she went to law school, her first two years at Emory University in Atlanta and her third year at the University of Connecticut School of Law. She practiced in New London for 20 years. During that time, she was active in the Connecticut Bar Association and she was one of the four judges, two male and two female, who served on the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Court. (The court can handle civil judicial disputes within the Mashantucket community and such matters as employment termination and law suits, often slip and fall claims, brought by casino visitors.)
In 1996, Barbara was appointed a superior court judge. The process, she recalls, took about three years from the time she indicated an interest in serving on the bench to her appointment.
“It can get very political, knowing representatives and senators,” she explains. “I had no political clout so it took a bit longer.”
In 2007, Connecticut’s chief justice, Chase Rogers, appointed Barbara as chief court administrator. Barbara was the first woman to become the chief court administrator, a position that involves dealing with budgets, personnel, and the court system’s relationship to the legislature. Recently, She was interviewed by Connecticut Public Television for some two hours for an oral history program of the Connecticut Bar Foundation. Another Connecticut Superior Court Judge, Susan Peck, also a Chester resident, did the interviewing.
“I’m not really sure what they are going to do with all of it,” Barbara admits.
As administrator, Barbara no longer heard cases, but since her retirement in 2013, she has had the opportunity to do so once again as a trial referee.
“It’s really the same as being a superior court judge,” she explains, but with the opportunity to create a less demanding schedule. Barbara retired as chief court administrator at the mandatory age of 70.
Today, she gardens, reads, plays with grandchildren, and several hours a week practices singing. Singing in a chorus, she says, is as much about the listeners as the singers.
“When the audience is enthusiastic, it bolsters our efforts,” she says. “We respond when the audience responds. It’s not a one-way experience. There is an energy that flows between the singer, the conductor, the orchestra and the audience.”
Still, Barbara admits to a recurring anxiety dream about what could go wrong at a choral performance.
“I am singing when nobody else is,” she says.
That, in the waking world, has never happened.