Women’s choir to make joy
Christmas is coming and it’s time to get some holiday cheer. Luckily, the Utah State University Women’s Choir is giving it out in doses this Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.
“The Women’s Choir is open enrollment and we have a broad spectrum of abilities. These ladies are incredible. Some would expect a lower degree of excellence from them for that reason and their expectations would be wrong,” Lane Cheney, director of choral music at Utah State, said.
Lindsay Clark, a senior in choral education and the choral education assistant, said,”Music is not about sounding good. It’s about conveying feelings and emotions. That is what this choir can do – plus the bonus of sounding good as well.”
Clark said the whole concert will only last about 45 minutes.
“We understand that finals are coming up and the semester’s ending,” Clark said. “People want to get that holiday tradition in and we’re making that possible.”
The selection of music is also a factor for drawing students and other community members in for the show.
“We’re going to have the Christmas favorites that everyone expects to hear, but for the majority of it, we’ll be singing traditional English carols that don’t get a lot of play in this country,” Cheney said. “You know, those songs that really bring a good spirit to us when we hear them.”
Many of these songs are ones prepared by Sir David Willcocks, he said, who was an Englishman knighted by Queen Victoria for his contributions toward bringing forward religiousness in the carols.
Cheney said he wants the group to become like a community, not just a performing group.
“I want this group to become a community. That is literally what happens to these women. We start out each session by giving backrubs and it’s really like one large family,” he said.
“I love the Women’s Choir. I’ve been in it for five semesters and I couldn’t imagine leaving it,” Clark said. “As a community, we are sharing everything we have. Singing is not like playing an instrument. If you do a bad job at a concert, you can blame it on your horn not being warm or some other thing. With singing, it’s just you, and we need to lean on each other for support in our weaknesses as well as our strengths.”
In addition to this season’s music, women’s choirs have a long and extensive history.
Compared to other genres of music, vocal or instrumental, there is more than 900 years of work to look through, Cheney said.
“Hildegard von Vingen was one of the first composers, woman or otherwise, to have specific scores of music associated with her name,” he said. “It’s with this background that we’re able to have a lot to work with. Her works are the bedrock of the art, so, unlike some areas that can only date back a few hundred years, we have quite a bit more to work from.”
With just a little under two weeks left for the rest of the semester, Cheney and Clark said they want to encourage everyone not to miss this good opportunity for a bit of Christmas cheer.
“For those who have been to a bad concert or never been at all, this is the one you’ll want to come to. We expect that those who come will go away changed and a little bit more in the holiday spirit,” they said.
-nebutler@cc.usu.edu