The Choir School of Delaware’s new season of music is getting underway.
Amplify: Art That Resonates is an effort to introduce audiences to works they may not have heard before - but should.
“This year we’re going to be amplifying the voices of historically excluded composers and also poets as well," said Choir School’s director of music and operations Arreon Harley-Emerson. "So that would include music by Black and Brown composers, women, Asian- American composers and those that we might not necessarily see because we are typically at a concert seeing the contributions of Beethoven, Bach and Brahms - which are all wonderful and are all great.”
Harley-Emerson says the season’s first show - Total Praise - is this Sunday at Grace United Methodist Church in Wilmington beginning at 4 p.m.
He says the show is modeled after the form and movements of Gabriel Faure’s Requiem, “So the idea behind Total Praise is - we were actually thinking about (Gabriel) Faure’s Requiem, which is one of the great pieces of core literature. And we thought, I wonder how we could use this form of a Requiem - because Faure does some things that are very interesting; it’s in a different sequence and order than some are, some different texts are in it, than in the typical Requiem mass.”
Harley-Emerson adds that Total Praise fuses Faure’s Requiem with the depth, soul and artistic richness of Black and Brown composers’ works. It’s part of the season-long commitment to amplifying the voices of historically excluded composers.
Tickets for this show and information on the entire season’s line-up can be found at here.
Delaware Public Media' s arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
