Congratulations to RHS Spudders Alissa Avery, Kennadi Jones, Ella Ross, and Anna Vande Kroll on being selected for the All-Northwest Honor Choir! By being selected, these students will perform at the Northwestern American Choral Directors Association conference in Spokane, WA March 9-12. The Northwestern Region of ACDA covers six states, representing tens of thousands of eligible singers in ACDA member choirs. Out of all of those eligible students, these talented singers’ applications were selected as being among the very best.
The theme for this year’s conference is “Hearts All Whole”, where gathered choral conductors, composers, students, and teachers from across our six-state region will celebrate the return to singing together and the ways in which choral music can be a healing, bridge-building art form.
The theme comes from James Agee’s poem, Sure on This Shining Night. Even in the midst of this past year’s figurative night—of the pandemic, of striving to create more equitable systems and practices, of the discord in our nation—choral music can be a place in which “All is healed, all is health.” Composer Morten Lauridsen will be a guiding presence in this spirit as the conference headliner.
The conference opens with Edith Copley conducting a combined-collegiate-choirs performance of his Lux aeterna, a piece that invites us to remember those we have lost while also looking to the future with hope. The conference closes with an all-conference singing of Lauridsen’s Sure on This Shining Night, with the composer himself at the piano as the choirs sing.