honors choirs + sufjan

We're blessed with a wealth of choirs here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes and it obviously wouldn't be a proper 150th anniversary if we didn't have a kajillion choral concerts honoring that aspect of the state's heritage. I've been through one already and, last Sunday, I had the opportunity to go down to Rochester and work with the Honors Choirs of Southeast Minnesota on a few of my pieces for their March VOICES concert.

I've been involved with this organization off and on since 2003 as a subsitute conductor for rehearsals but this is the first time they've actually done any of my compositions. I spoke with the Treble Choir (5th and 6th graders) about The Arrow & The Song and worked with the Concert Choir (the advanced SATB choir of high school students) on when god decided to invent. Both choirs did an understandably amazing job and I'm anxious to see how my pieces will fit in with the concert as a whole.

Here's the Concert Choir doing some sort of weird, kinesthetic warmup excercises.













On a side note I just bought Sufjan Stevens' Avalanche album. It's all material that got cut from his 2005 Illinoise album...which was already 22 tracks to begin with. Heap on top of that Avalanche's 21 more and you come up with a grand total of 43 songs for one recording session! This guy just doesn't know how to disappoint. In fact, he plays almost everything on the album. And I'm not talking about just playing guitar, drums and bass, either. He plays flute, English horn, oboe, trumpet and a bunch of other stuff. It's ridiculous.

















So that's that. It's a pretty slow blog season at the moment. Work on the opera has slowed to a (temporary) halt and I don't have any residencies until late February. I'm thinking about doing some more philosophical stuff that might be a little more interesting to read. We'll see, I guess. Happy trails.