“I Will Just Say This”

“I Will Just Say This”

On Wednesday, March 6th, the UM Choirs bring you our Carnegie send-off concert! The UM-Missoula Community Chorus will perform music that many of our members will be performing with the National Concerts Festival Chorus at Carnegie Hall! University Choir will feature guest student conductors.  Chamber Chorale will perform our spotlight set for the Carnegie stage, journeying through the cycle of a year. We will begin with a dawn of hope in the winter’s dark, through challenge of belief in spring, then a drive toward non-violent self-discovery in fall, and finally, a celebration of it all. Our first composer, Reena Esmail, has fused the Catholic hour of Lauds with the Hindustani Raag Ahir Bhairav, and tied them together with poetry on the dawn after the Winter Solstice, when “the dark withdraws” and “[i]n us, the sun believes.” Minneapolis composer, Edie Hill, finds inspiration in “the stuff of life;” in “We Bloomed in Spring,” we sing of plant-based imagery, where “our bodies are the leaves of God.” This metaphor propels the choir into “digging my feet into the ground like an apple tree,” cutting away anger to replace it with acceptance, in Katerina Gimon’s arrangement of Aurora Aksnes’ pop song, “Apple Tree.” Finally, South Korean composer Hyowon Woo brings us full-circle back to December with Alleluia—a single-word, yet dazzlingly complex musical exclamation of joy amidst darkness.