Wednesday, Dec 21, 2011
Performing in West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia
by Anne Sears
The Westminster Choir and conductor Joe Miller embark on their 2012 tour of five southern states on January 4. The concert program, entitled “Light of a Clear Blue Morning: Sound and Memory, ” will explore memory and music's ability to connect individuals and communities.
It includes Thomas Weelkes’s Gloria in Excelsis Deo; Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Priidite, poklonitusia” from All-Night Vigil; Bo Hansson’s Lighten Mine Eyes and Paul Crabtree’s Five Romantic Miniatures from The Simpsons, as well Moses Hogan’s arrangement of Battle of Jericho and Craig Hella Johnson’s arrangement of Dolly Parton’s Light of a Clear Blue Morning, for which the program is named. The ensemble will also perform two new works by Westminster Choir College students: Daniel Elder’s Seven Last Words from the Cross and Thomas LaVoy’s White Stones. Download a pdf of the program.
Music lovers can learn more about the tour program through a Westminster-to-Go podcast featuring Maestro Miller on iTunes and the Westminster Web site. They can also follow the tour with blog postings by Westminster Choir member Andrew Lusher.
Tour Schedule
Friday, January 6 - Nashville, TN
Saturday, January 7 - Oxford, MS
Sunday, January 8 - Birmingham, AL
Wednesday, January 11 - Atlanta, GA
Friday, January 13 - Knoxville, TN
Saturday, January 14 - Charleston, WV
Read the Birmingham concert review.
Giving Voice to Community
Audience members will have the opportunity to participate in a Westminster Choir College project that explores the relationship between music, memory and community.
Entitled Giving Voice to Community, the project documents the unique community created at a concert or performance.
“This concert seeks to connect us in a way that goes beyond words. The power of music, an ephemeral art form, can change the way that we feel about the world,” says Maestro Miller. “Each time we perform we create a new community - a community composed of the choir and the audience. For those few hours we share an experience, a connection, a moment in time. We may enter the concert hall as strangers, and we may never see each other again, but for those few hours we are a community connected through music. “
Before each concert begins, audience members will invited to draw on their memory and consider their lives and to choose one word that defines them as the join the concert “community.” After writing the word on a piece of paper, he or she will be photographed holding the paper with the selected word. All of the photographs taken before the concert will displayed in a slide show outside of the concert hall after the performance and later uploaded to the Westminster Choir College Web site.
Later, a video will be created combining the photographs taken at each concert with some of the music performed by the choir, and it will be uploaded to the Internet. This electronic creation will serve as an archive – a memory - of a unique moment in time shared by a community created through music.
