Chorale Chronicles: Huntsville Choral Festival 2024
Festival is a word that conjures up all kinds of feelings. Whatever else we might think of when we hear the word, there is almost always some celebration connected to the word.
I sang in high school choirs many years ago. At that level, Festival was a regional event in the spring that served as a culmination of a year’s work for choirs. We worked all year to get ready for Festival. The event involved traveling to a neighboring school and performing two or three pieces we had worked on for weeks and months. I was fortunate to attend a school with a rich history of choral excellence. There were three or four schools in our region that competed for who would be the best choir in the area. Those bragging rights were mostly things we came up with for ourselves. We were not evaluated against each other, but each school received ratings from Superior down to less flattering words. Anything less that Superiors from all the adjudicators, and we were mortified. So some of my Festival memories involved apprehension and satisfaction.
The Huntsville Choral Music Festival is not a competition among choirs. Each spring, we invite area singers to join with singers from the Huntsville Master Chorale and learn new music and work with an accomplished clinician to work that music into a performance for the community. Instead of competing against one another, we work hard at becoming one community committed to learning and performing beautiful choral music.
This year, our third annual Festival brought Dr. Pearl Shangkuan, Director of Choral Activities at Calvin University in Michigan and incoming President of the American Choral Director’s Association, to Huntsville for two days of rehearsal and performance. Dr. Shangkuan, in collaboration with Dr. Patricia Ramirez Hacker, Artistic Director of the Huntsville Master Chorale, had selected a challenging but accessible program for this year’s Festival. Singers had rehearsed in groups and on their own for several weeks in preparation for the event. They came together with Dr. Shangkuan for rehearsals on Friday night and much of the day on Saturday before presenting the Festival Concert on Saturday afternoon.
Similar to how our kids and grandkids to go sports and arts camps in the summer to learn new skills and hone existing ones, singers from across the Tennessee Valley were privileged to learn from a master clinician and to build a community around beautiful choral music. Hopefully we will all be able to take the skills we learned back to the choirs in communities and churches where we sing throughout the year and to continue to develop our abilities as singers, directors, and others involved in choral singing.
Plans are already underway for the fourth annual Huntsville Choral Music Festival next spring (May 30-31, 2025). Maybe you’ll want to join us when Dr. Jason Max Ferdinand, another great clinician, joins us with a new opportunity to learn and sing together. There are no judges or scores. This is a very low stress opportunity to sing quality music under great leadership with people from across our area and beyond who love to sing. We hope you’ll join us.