“Home” is a deceivingly small word that encompasses a big collection of big ideas. What is home? When are you there? What does it mean to be there?
These are some of the questions WCU Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities, Dr. Allison Thorp, has assigned the university’s two biggest choral ensembles to explore in this month’s Fall Choir Ensemble. The performance will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 26 at Bardo Arts Center, and revolve around the theme, “home.”
Dr. Thorp is an Assistant Professor of Music and the Director of Choral Activities at WCU. (Photo courtesy of wcu.edu.)
The concert will feature WCU’s 28-member Concert Chorus and 100-member University Chorus. The Concert Chorus will be the first to perform during the one-hour show. After they have performed a set, two guest musicians from the Cherokee community, Matt Tooni and John Toineeta, will take the stage for a short set, before being joined by the University Chorus for a pair of collaborative pieces. The University Chorus will perform the rest of the show on its own.
Thorp explained that she developed the idea for the concert’s theme of “home” while she selected songs for one of the choir’s other upcoming shows. In spring, the Concert Chorus will go to New York to perform at the Lincoln Center.
“I wanted to include music that represented who we are here in Western Carolina,” said Thorp. “So that kind of led to the first inklings of this idea.”
Thorp told Ethnomusicologist and WCU Assistant Professor of Cherokee Studies Dr. Sara Snyder that the Concert Chorus was interested in representing the community that first called the western North Carolina mountains home, and Snyder hooked the choir up with experienced Cherokee Musician Matt Tooni.
When Tooni met with the ensemble in mid-September to help prepare for the show, the choir was learning a westernized arrangement of the Cherokee Amazing Grace. Tooni was honest with Thorp.
“That’s not the way we sing it,” he told her. The version the Concert Choir had been learning was unauthentic. The original was combined with another tribe’s musical piece and then translated into a new meter.
Together, Tooni and Thorp picked two new songs that they agreed better represented the Cherokee community – one of which was a more traditional version of the Cherokee Amazing Grace. Tooni has been helping the singers master not only the musicality of the pieces, but also the pronunciation of the Cherokee language.
WCU Concert Choir. (Photo courtesy of Allison Thorp.)
The collection started with songs the choral director thought embodied the place we call home, like shape note hymns, those traditional Cherokee songs and even an arrangement of a Dolly Parton tune. Since settling on that theme, Thorp has expanded the choirs’ sets to include African, German and Haitian songs that dive deeper into the complexity of the meaning of “home.”
“I think you can make wherever you are into your home,” said Thorp. “My hope is that these singers will feel that and do that for Western. You can have multiple homes. You don’t have to have just one. Western, and more specifically choir, can be a place where they have a sense of belonging.”
Burgin Mackey, a WCU sophomore and member of the Concert Choir, says he has learned a lot about music and life from the program.
“When [Dr. Thorp] introduced the concept of “home” as our theme for our current repertoire, I immediately thought vividly of soup beans and cornbread cooking in my kitchen while I sat by the fire… on our mountainside farm,” said Mackey. “I snapped back to reality with a song that was about as far from my home as humanly possible. I really thought about how “home” can mean different things to different people.”
“I love the theme of home,” said Briana McManus, a WCU senior and assistant director of the University Chorus. “As a senior in college it has been an excellent theme to close out my time in choir. I have done a lot of reflecting on what home means to me throughout this semester and I have come to the conclusion home is not necessarily a place but a feeling.”
Thorp encourages everyone to come check out the Fall Choir Concert this Thursday evening.
“There’s a lot of cool things that happen at Western that people don’t know about, or because they’ve never been to one, they feel nervous about coming. It doesn’t cost anything. Just come explore some of the things we’re doing on campus.”
McManus agreed, saying: “This concert will be very heartwarming for everyone in attendance as we explore what home means to each of us individually and try and make the audience members feel at home as well.”
