Arts Activities Support

In our post-project review, we heard how both the singers themselves and those who attended the concerts, found the concerts to be both inspiring and educational. Many discovered how musically complex and sophisticated this genre is. We exceeded our goals for artistic satisfaction and performed for nearly 400 people. While this number was lower than our goal it was one of our largest audiences. This project was both successful and inspiring. Through this two hour concert both audience and singers experienced the rich texture and variety of music written by Black composers outside the spiritual, gospel, and jazz genres, which are most often associated with them. The project had four artistic goals, all of which were fully realized. The singers had a chance to learn, and the audience to hear, works that were mostly unfamiliar to them. These works were complex and demonstrated the beauty and sophistication of works from this little known genre. Through both program notes and verbal comments by our conductor, G. Phillip Shoultz, singers and audience members learned of the historical context of these pieces and how the personal background of the composers had influenced their style and their compositions. Our program also featured music written by Black women. In fact one of the composers featured, Undine Smith Moore, (1904 – 1989) is known as the Dean of Black Women composers for blazing a trail for others. Most of our singers had never heard of her but expressed a desire to perform more of her music. The musical quality of the program was excellent. Dr. Shoultz is one of the top young conductors in the US. We brought to Minnesota soloist Dr. Gregory Broughton, of the University of Georgia, who is known as one of the top tenors in the US in performing our concert center piece, the oratorio “I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes.” This piece was accompanied by a professional orchestra. This performance was unique since the piece, when it is performed, is most often performed with only a piano. The results were stunning with audience members, even those experienced choral audience members, commenting on how moved they were and wondering why they had never heard this piece before. Most of our artistic plans worked well – rehearsal time was adequate for learning the music and performing at a high level. The addition of the children’s choir, ComMUSICation, added both additional opportunities for combined adult/children singing but also provided artistic growth for these children. They had challenging role and were expected to perform at a higher level than they had previously done. They appreciated this challenge and the audience was impressed with their growth from the previous time we had performed with them. One area we would change if we did a similar project, was that the concert ended up being too long. We have found 60 – 75 minute concerts are optimal, but this concert ended up being nearly two hours long (with an intermission). This happened, in part, because the orchestra played two pieces alone and the conductor’s comments took more time than planned. However, the conductor’s concert comments were excellent and very important to the artistic goal of the concert. In hindsight, programming two or three pieces less would have made the concert more enjoyable for our audience. Overall, we were extremely pleased with the outcome. As planned, the participants and attendees served and benefited by this project were drawn from the Twin Cities metro area and western Wisconsin. There was a high level of interest and enthusiasm for this project from area choral singers and we ended up with 70 singers (50 adults and 20 children under 18) who volunteered many hours of their time and completed the project. These singers, auditioned for choral singing skills, were from a wide range of ages: 13 – 75 years old. Many of the children come from communities of color. Singers were provided a variety of aids to learn music so that the different learning styles could be accommodated. Since the singers came from a variety of religious/ethnic/socioeconomic backgrounds, no one was required to pay to participate. All felt that their religious beliefs were not compromised in any way by the texts of the music chosen. A full orchestra, honoring the specifications of the composer, was hired to perform the oratorio. The collaborative singer/conductor model unique to Singers in Accord helps to further weave the rich fabric of community relationships built around choral music. In these ways our intended community was the one reached. While we accomplished tremendous diversity of age, gender, and ethnicity in our choir, our audience was diverse primarily only by age and gender. Since this concert was focused on performing music of Black Composers, we promoted the concert, using discounted tickets to most of the Black Church congregations in the Twin Cities. Unfortunately our attendance surveys indicated that not many individuals from those churches attended. The ethnic diversity we did have in our audiences came primarily from families of the children who were performing. We were delighted to see that and promoted their attendance by providing free tickets to families of the children. In the future, we will likely need to make personal contacts and appearances at churches or community gatherings if we are to attract more people of color to a concert like this. We also attempted to draw more students to the concert through offering free-tickets to students. This drew a few students, but not as many as we hoped. Future attempts will be made to promote the concert to school choirs so that students can be encouraged to come in groups not just as individuals.