Editor’s note: since the publishing of this article in 2013, the School celebrated its 150th anniversary and published Brooklyn Friends School: 150 Years of Light. Some of us will remember that BFS did publish a book about its history, Seventy Five Years of Brooklyn Friends School, in celebration of the school’s 75th anniversary in 1942 […]
It is a musical time in the Archives. A faculty member’s recent request to see the highly-acclaimed Academy Award winning documentary Close Harmony sparked nice memories. Filmed at BFS during the 1979-80 school year, Close Harmony was directed by alum parent Nigel Noble and chronicles the Intergenerational Chorus, which was the brainchild of our […]
The paper of record at BFS was once known as The Life. An award-winning student publication, The Life was published continuously at BFS from December of 1919 until, we believe, 1995. For its first 50 years or so, The Life was made available to the entire BFS community for a small annual fee because it […]
The second school song written for BFS is The BFS Alma Mater. The lyrics were written by noted sci-fi author and BFS alum Edgar Pangborn ’24 and the music was composed by BFS music teacher J. Trevor Garmey during the 1920s. Read also Our School Songs, Part 1. To read more about Brooklyn Friends School’s history, visit […]
For many years, students at BFS have been singing the wonderful song Simple Gifts as the official school song of BFS. Introduced in the 1970s or 1980s during a choir concert, the Shaker dance song Simple Gifts was quickly adopted as our school’s much-beloved song. There are, in fact, two earlier school songs which were written for BFS […]
