CONFERENCE OVERVIEW

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Gathering choral conductors, composers, students, and teachers from across our six-state region, we will celebrate our return to singing together and the ways in which choral music can be a healing, bridge-building art form.

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Our 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 our headliner. We open the conference with Edith Copley conducting a combined-collegiate-choirs performance of his Lux aeterna, a piece that invites us to remember those we have lost and also look to the future with hope. We will close the conference with an all-conference sing of Lauridsen’s Sure on This Shining Night, with the composer himself at the piano as we sing.