Singing with The Singers

This weekend I went on a very fun, though emotional, bus trip with The Singers on a tour of Northern Minnesota.
We began in Staples, MN which is a small town with a huge community of musicians. We're only about a quarter of the singers you see in this awesome photo above (borrowed from facebook).
We collaborated with the Staples Area Women's Chorus, Staples Area Men's Chorus and Staples Motley High School A Capella Choir along with some local instrumentalists performing Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna.
It was such a great concert! Singing with so many people is an indescribable experience.
Being in the middle of all that music-making is truly the best way to spend a Saturday evening.

Then on Sunday we drove up to Duluth to sing another concert, this one a very meaningful and at times quite emotional sing.
We were premiering a new work dedicated to the life and tragic death of a seminary student who died in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Ben Larson.
He was a Luther Alumni and there are folks who sing in The Singers who knew him well. We sang the new work "He Was Singing" by Joshua Shank at the church in Duluth where Ben's parents are the co-pastors.

Our tour continues this weekend with a visit to Carleton College in Northfield, MN, which I think will be a little difficult for me. One of the only people I know who went to Carleton was a childhood friend, we were Sunday school and high school classmates, and he was killed in a car accident about 6 years ago.
The theme of this concert is Love, Loss and Healing, and I will be thinking a lot about Andy while we're down there.

We end our tour on Sunday at First Lutheran Church in Columbia Heights, just north of Saint Paul.

I would love if you could come and join us, our Artistic Director and Music Advisor chose some wonderful, transcendent music to accompany "He Was Singing" and you really are carried through Love, Loss and Healing when you hear it.