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The UW’s top auditioned choirs present their Winter Quarter Concert. The Chamber Singers (Geoffrey Boers director) present “Out from the Tempest,” performing works by Johannes Brahms, Sarah Quartel, and Jake Runestad. The University Chorale (Giselle Wyers, director) sings in six languages (Icelandic, English, Arabic, Hindi, Kannada and Gujarati) in its set including pieces about love and spring written by Icelandic composers and a set of choral music inspired by Indian folk music. With guest composer/saxophonist Michael Brockman.
Masks are required in all indoor spaces on the UW campus, and patrons must show proof of vaccination or recent (within 72 hours of the performance) negative COVID-19 test for entry to live events at Meany Hall. Enhanced sanitation measures and touchless ticketing are among other safety measures in effect for 2021-22. Details of these policies and procedures are at: https://artsevents.washington.edu/covid-protocols
PROGRAM (CLICK HERE FOR FULL PROGRAM)
In Memory and Gratitude: Dr. JoAnn Taricani
University Chorale
The First Step in a Lifetime
Giselle Wyers, conductor
Leah Wyman, Marshell Lombard, & Mark Petty, assistant conductors
This Morning by Reg Unterseher (b. 1956)
text by Afrose Fatima Ahmed
Vor hinsti dagur er hniginn (The Last Day of Spring is Setting) by Haukur Tómasson (b. 1960)
text by Halldór Laxness (1902-1988)
Afmorsvísa (Love Song) by Snorri Sigfús Birgisson (b. 1954)
text by Páll Vīdalín (1667–1727)
Drottin einn akur á (The Lord Has a Field) by Hildigunnur Rúnarsdóttir (b. 1964)
text by Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614–1674)
Tarekita by Reena Esmail (b. 1983)
composer in residence with Seattle Symphony
Jalakamaladala arr. Nariman H. Wadia | U.S. premier
Gujarati folksong on a poem by Narasimha Mehta (1414–1481)
Sung in Gujarati
Solo: Akhila Narayanan
Raagi Thandeera by Purandara Dasa (1484–1564)
Carnatic devotional song
arr. Sheena Phillips (b. 1958) and Smitha Vishveshwara
Sung in Kannada
Arush Joshi, tablas
Zikr by A.R. Rahman (b. 1967)
arr. Ethan Sperry (b. 1971)
Sung in Arabic and Urdu
Solo: Eyad Alsilimy
Ēka Satya (The Blind Men and the Elephant) by Michael Brockman
Ancient Hindi Poem
Michael Brockman, saxophone
Isabella Kodama, cello
Annie Penta, tanpura
Chamber Singers
Out from the Tempest
Geoffrey Boers, conductor
Tiffany Walker, Timothy Little Trần, assistant conductors
Schicksalslied, Op. 54 (Song of Fate) by Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
text from Hyperion by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843)
Orchestral Reduction by Serena Chin, piano
A Winter Day by Sarah Quartel
Isabella Kodama, cello
Serena Chin, piano
- Timid Star…..Text by Sarah Teasdale
- A Winter Dawn…..Text by Lucy Maud Montgomery
- Into Morning…..sung without words
- A Winter Day……Text by Lucy Maud Montgomery
- Snow Toward evening…..Text by Melville Cane
Proud Music of the Storm by Jake Runestad (b. 1986)
text by Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
Serena Chin, piano
BIOS
Geoffrey Boers is Director of Choral Activities at the University of Washington in Seattle, a program widely recognized as forward thinking, unique, and of great distinction. Under his direction, the graduate choral program has developed a singular mission: to nurture the whole student as conductor-teacher-servant-leader-scholar. This vision has led the program to become one of the most vibrant and innovative in the country, attracting students from around the world interested in exploring the future of our art. Through his teaching he is exploring the evolution of conducting gesture and rehearsal pedagogy and their connection with the emerging neuroscience of mirror neurons, empathy, perception, learning, and personal transformation. His exploration has led to new thoughts about conducting and teaching with regard to breath, movement, artistry, personal awareness, and cultural development. Recently, his work has led to the mentoring of local choral cohorts of teachers and conductors who are interested in building professional communities of ongoing mentorship and musical development. He has developed such mentorship programs across the United States and Canada. In addition to these thoughts about mentorship he is actively working with other leaders in ACDA and NAfME to develop a more unified and useful system for development of musicianship, assessment, adjudication, and repertoire grading.
Geoffrey maintains an active conducting, teaching, workshop and clinic schedule; his recent engagements have included conducting concerts in Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, Meyerson Concert Hall in Dallas, New York’s Alice Tully and Avery Fischer Hall at Lincoln Center, the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, and Benaroya Hall in Seattle. In addition he has served as artist-in-residence in Toronto, Ontario, Mainz, Germany, as well as Seoul, Korea with the world-renown choir the Incheon City Chorale.
In addition to his position at the UW, Boers sings professionally and is the conductor of the Tacoma Symphony Chorus where he conducts both the choir and symphony players in a four-concert season.
Since his tenure at the University of Washington, the choral program has become a leader in promoting the performance, study and exchange of Baltic music in the United States. The choir has toured to the Baltic countries in 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2013. Geoffrey Boers was awarded a prestigious Royalty Research Grant in 2004 to create a Baltic Choral Library in collaboration with the UW Library as well as State and academic libraries in the Baltic. This collection of scores, manuscripts, vocal music, and writings is the first of its kind in the United States. This collection has promoted yearly exchanges with choirs and conductors from the Baltic area who travel each year to Seattle. Further, it has led to numerous UW choral students winning awards and scholarships to travel, study, and work in the Baltic countries.
Giselle Wyers (she/her/hers) is the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professor of Choral Music at the University of Washington, where she conducts the award-winning University Chorale and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in choral conducting and music education. She serves as the newly appointed School of Music's designated Diversity Liaison. University Chorale’s latest CD, Chasing Daybreak, will begin streaming in January 2024 on Apple Music and Spotify. Their third CD, Resonant Streams (on the MSR Music Recordings label) was featured in a 2018 Gramophone magazine article. Wyers is the newly appointed director of Concord Chamber Choir, an adult community chorus within the Columbia Choirs community. Her professional project choir Solaris Vocal Ensemble, specializes in the performance of contemporary American choral literature. Their premiere album Floodsongs, on the Albany Music label, won the American Prize Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music in 2017-18.
As a guest conductor, Wyers has led high school honor choirs and all-state choruses in New York (Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center), Kansas, Wisconsin, Georgia, Missouri, Louisiana, Connecticut, Nebraska, Texas, Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Nevada and Vancouver, Canada. She has conducted semi-professional ensembles across the United States and in Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Sweden.
Wyers is a leading national figure in the application of Laban movement theory for conductors. She has served as guest lecturer in conducting at Sweden’s Örebro Universitet, European Festival of Church Music (Germany), Latvian Academy of Music, Eastman School of Music, Ithaca College, Westminster Choir College, University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Portland State University.
Wyers’ choral works are published by Santa Barbara Music Publishing Company as part of the "Giselle Wyers Choral Series," as well as with MusicSpoke and Hildegard Publishing. Her works have been performed across the United States, South America, Canada, Australia, Cuba, and numerous European cities. She conducted her 30-minute choral cycle entitled And All Shall Be Well, in Carnegie Hall during May of 2022 with a consortium of NW-based choruses, and she will return with a newly composed choral/orchestral work in May of 2026. In 2021-22, she served as composer-in-residence for the Greater Seattle Choral Consortium's annual festivities celebrating the return of in-person singing (her appearance was sponsored by Consortio). Wyers is also committed to mentoring scholar-writers in the field, and served on the editorial board of ACDA’s Choral Journal for six years.
Michael Brockman, DMA, moved from the East Coast to Seattle in 1987 to join the UW School of Music faculty. He instructs concert and jazz saxophone performance, and jazz arranging and composition. Brockman earned a Doctor of Musical Arts from the UW, and a Master of Music degree with distinction from the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he studied arranging with Jaki Byard, composition with George Russell, and woodwind performance with Joe Allard. He earned a bachelor of music degree from Lewis and Clark College, and also attended both the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and the Musikhochschule in Cologne, Germany.
Brockman's doctoral dissertation is titled "Orchestration Techniques of Duke Ellington," and he has transcribed numerous classic large ensemble scores by Ellington, Mingus, Mulligan, Lunceford, Kenton, Monk and others. He is the lead saxophonist and co-director of the award-winning Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, and has performed with Wynton Marsalis, Clark Terry, Frank Wess, Frank Foster, Jimmy Heath, Quincy Jones, James Moody, Benny Carter, Ernestine Anderson, Arturo Sandoval, Ella Fitzgerald, Jon Hendricks, Joe Williams, and many other luminaries of jazz. The SRJO presents the annual Duke Ellington Sacred Concert in Seattle (now in its 23rd year), plus an annual subscription concert series of rare big band works. In addition to performing in the SRJO, Brockman has prepared scores for much of the band's repertoire, based on rare vintage recordings of unpublished works by great composers.
As both a jazz soloist and a classical recitalist, he has toured throughout Europe and the eastern United States. He is an active professional performer in numerous Seattle ensembles, including the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and appears on nationally acclaimed recordings with Jimmy Heath, the SSO, the SRJO, and Seattle drummer Clarence Acox, whose 1991 CD Joanna's Dance and 1992 CD Indigenous Groove were consecutively selected as Album of the Year by Seattle's Earshot magazine.
A perpetual student of woodwind acoustics, Brockman is the inventor of a patented device called the "Broctave Key" (U.S. Patent WO/2010/068909) that provides an additional octave/register vent to any wind instrument.
Brockman has premiered many new works for saxophone, including the West Coast premiere of Sonata for Saxophone by Gunther Schuller, and has appeared as a soloist in the Reims Music Festival, the Dubrovnik Music Festival, the World Saxophone Congress, the Stanford Computer Music Festival, the New Music Across America Festival, the Seattle New Music for Saxophone Festival, the Northwest Saxophone Symposium, and many others. Brockman is a clinician for the Selmer Company.
Brockman is Director of the UW Jazz in Paris program. For information, visit http://faculty.washington.edu/brockman/jazzinparis/jazzinparis.htm/
For more information about the UW Saxophone Studio visit http://faculty.washington.edu/brockman/