BFS
Our Strategic Vision

Caring for Community with Gifts of Music

  On May 2nd, BFS 7th grade students Ana N. and Cal S., 8th grade student Breyten N. and a student from Poly Prep performed a thirty minute chamber concert for a homebound older neighbor in her Brooklyn Heights apartment. The neighbor lives alone but participates in the Heights and Hills Case Management Program through […]

Mysteries from the Video Archives

Dance Concert Rehearsal, probably 1998 Digitizing much of the BFS dance department’s video collection for the BFS Archives video collection yielded unidentified rehearsal videos and one music concert video. Most of these videos seem to have been created after 2000. One dance concert rehearsal video seems to be from 1992 or 1998: that video was […]

A shy princess from BFS’s Once Upon A Mattress, 1988

1988 Once Upon A Mattress – Shy From the 1988 BFS musical production of Once Upon A Mattress comes the song “Shy” in which Princess Winnifred the Woebegone expresses her true nature as she tries to find Prince Dauntless the Drab for the very first time. And this after she swam the moat to get […]

Feeling your Blue Pride? Make that Indigo

It’s a throwback this fine Thursday to the “Mood Indigo” scene from the 1989 BFS original musical A Small Cabaret. A Small Cabaret was a departure from the traditional BFS musical: this ensemble production featured standards like Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” yet it also […]

A bolt from the blue, it’s true, it’s you…

1987 Dames At Sea Take two minutes to enjoy a charming duet in the BFS Middle School’s 1987 production of Dames at Sea, capturing the moment when our romantic leads Dick and Ruby first meet, she swoons into his arms and they both know it’s true love. You might also get a kick out of […]

New to the Digital Archives

This week, we have a few additions to the Digital Archives. Two new items in Playbills: the 1980 Middle School production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride and the 1982 Intergenerational Chorus performance at the CUNY NYC College of Technology’s Klitgord Auditorium on Jay Street.  The BFS Sampler 2 photo album has now […]

Che bella voce!

  Take a look back to 1993 for a fabulous rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at BFS, sung by Middle and Upper School science teacher and past athletic director Janet Villas. Big thanks for making this possible go straight out to several of my BFS colleagues: director of media services Andy Cohen for the […]

That Show Took My Breath Away…

  Always fun to find playbills from BFS theatrical performances, so we are making some available as they emerge from the school’s archives and from personal collections. While more playbills are in the archives, we have scanned only a few programs from the personal collections of The Price Family and The Garrell Family at this […]

Close Harmony, of course!

  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 […]

Our School Songs, Part 2

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 […]

Our School Songs, Part 1

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 […]