Hello,
Happy September!
It was wonderful to see (and hear!) everyone last night and to welcome so many guests to our open rehearsal. It was lovely to return to making music with WVC as we embark on our 34th season and our next musical adventure.
A very special welcome to Kirsten Homdrom – so happy to welcome you to WVC as our accompanist/collaborative pianist!
And an enormous thank you to all who worked this past summer to prepare for the season.
For the next 7 rehearsals, we will be organized by sections. I encourage you all to sit next to different people each week so that you can fully enjoy the friendships and voices in your section. Please expect the section leaders to sit next to different singers so that they can provide support and leadership to all.
After auditions on Thursday evening, I may reassign voice parts to best balance our sections. I won’t move you to a section you have not indicated you are willing to sing and will let you know if I need you to switch parts so that everyone can get their music organized.
Once your voice part is confirmed, please mark your music so that you know which notes to sing. Karla has organized that information (along with EVERYTHING else!) on our website. Please also number all of the measures in your scores for quick reference during rehearsals.
Looking Ahead to 9/14 (no rehearsal on 9/7)
| Repertoire | 9/14/26 | 9/21/26 |
| Gia l’ore sen volano | 1-24 | |
| Now I Become Myself | 1-55 | |
| Grown Wild | 1-31 | |
| About Time | 1-40 | |
| There Was a Time | 1-23 | |
| What the Heart Cannot Forget | 1-57 | |
| From the Stone Age | 1-123 | |
| Controlled Burn | 1-109 | |
| Turn Around | 1-61 | |
| The Circle Game | 1-41 | |
| Try to Remember | 1-44 | |
| Seasons of Love | 1-32 | |
| Time (Chamber Choir) | Auditions 1-9 | |
| Wanting Memories (Chamber Choir) | Auditions 1-26 |
Chamber Choir auditions will be held on 9/21 at 9:30pm. you can find the scores on our website. Please be prepared to sing the indicated measures.
Here is some historical/cultural context regarding the pieces we will rehearse on 9/14.
Grown Wild – Melissa Dunphy (poetry by Melissa Apperson)
Melissa Dunphy and Melissa Apperson explore through music and poetry the relationship between one’s adult and childhood selves. Apperson’s text uses natural imagery – spring, meadows, climbing vines, things growing “wild” as a metaphor for growth that doesn’t discard the earlier self but integrates it. Dunphy described being drawn to the poem’s mix of “nostalgia and life-affirming anticipation.”
There Was a Time – Elaine Hagenberg (poetry by William Wordsworth)
Notes from the composer: In the midst of unimaginable grief, Tim and Jennifer Powell had a beautiful vision to commission a new piece in memory of their 9-year-old daughter, Lily Kate Powell. Upon reading this touching poem by William Wordsworth, Jennifer thought these words would be a fitting text to remember her daughter’s life. Although Wordsworth acknowledged pain and grief, he also celebrated beautiful memories and tender moments shared. When I first began composing this piece, my aim was to weave shimmering memories of their time together alongside the dissonant heartache of reality. Having witnessed a video of Lily innocently sitting at the piano and singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” I incorporated the same ascending octave in short melodic quotes throughout the piece. The final line of Wordsworth’s poem states “We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind.” Though Lily is no longer here, we can continue to celebrate her life by sharing her kindness and generous spirit.
From the Stone Age – Zanaida Stewart Robles (poetry by Alice Corbin Henderson)
Dr. Zanaida Stewart Robles is an award-winning Black American female composer, vocalist, and teacher. She is a fierce advocate for diversity and inclusion in music education and performance. Authentic interpersonal connection and relationship-building are core principles of her teaching and performance methods. Poet Alice Corbin Henderson (1881-1949) was known for her activism related to Indigenous rights and environmental conservation. This musical setting of Henderson’s poetry tells the story of a stone once carved in the semblance of a god. Over time, its surfaces are smoothed by the elements to reveal a beautiful resilience. Gradually, it becomes more beautiful and less rigid until its original form is unrecognizable and irrelevant. This piece explores time, the cosmos, and transformation through the embodiment of a stone.
The Circle Game – Joni Mitchell
The Circle Game is one of Joni Mitchell’s earliest and most enduring songs, and its story is tied up with the mid-1960s Canadian folk scene and a real friendship-turned-conversation-in-song with Neil Young. Mitchell wrote it while she and Young were both young folk musicians moving through the same circuit. They had crossed paths in Winnipeg and in Toronto’s Yorkville district, the coffeehouse neighborhood that was Canada’s answer to Greenwich Village in the folk-revival years. Young had written “Sugar Mountain” on his 19th birthday, a melancholy song about aging out of a magical, childlike place (“you can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain”). Mitchell later said Young felt like all the “groovy things to do were behind him now.” At 22 or 23 herself, Mitchell thought that was a bleak way to look at growing up (“if we get to 21 and there’s nothing after that, that’s a pretty bleak future”) and wrote “The Circle Game” partly as a direct reply — reframing aging as a cycle rather than a loss.
The lyrics follow one boy through childhood, age ten, sixteen (getting his driver’s license, hearing grown-up cautions), and twenty, each stage feeling permanent until the next one arrives, built around the central image of a carousel: people as “captives on the carousel of time,” unable to look back except in memory, unable to go back at all. It’s a song about the folk-revival generation’s own coming-of-age, written by someone barely past the age she’s singing about.
Seasons of Love – Jonathan Larson arr. Roger Emerson
“Seasons of Love” is the Act II opening number of Rent, Jonathan Larson’s 1996 rock musical. The song begins, “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,” counting out the minutes in a year and asking, “How do you measure a year in the life?” before answering: in love. Rent, the contemporary retelling of Puccini’s opera, La Bohème, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1996, running on Broadway until 2008. “Seasons of Love” quickly outgrew the show itself as a stand-alone piece often performed to mark significant passages in life.
I mentioned the 2020 virtual performance of What the Heart Cannot Forget at rehearsal last night. Hooray to everyone who took part in the project (what a time that was!). What the Heart Cannot Forget
I will miss our music-making next week but hope everyone enjoys the holiday weekend.
Laura