Voices Carry: Hundreds of singers, nine choirs at the first Kantorei Choral Festival Gala Concerts
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On Saturday, Jake Runestad will hear his new composition, Ritual, for the first time on the stage of the Bella Concert Hall.
It will eventually be part of a suitably epic and fitting finale for Calgary’s first choral festival. The Kantorei Choral Festival, which began Wednesday, will feature two mass choir shows on April 15 and 16 featuring hundreds of singers representing nine choirs. Runestad, a Minneapolis-based composer, was commissioned to write the six-minute piece for the festival and will hear it for the first time during Friday’s dress rehearsal.
“It’s always the most exciting time in a composer’s life when we hear something that has lived in our brain for so long finally in the air,” says Runestad. “I live for that moment. Over time, I’ve learned how to create worlds in my brain, like sound worlds. I imagine everyone on stage. I imagine being in that room and what the sound is like. That’s a whole part of the creative process.”
Runestad will join Oregon composer Joshua Rist, who was also commissioned to write a piece for the event, as a guest at the festival. Singers attending the event will be able to sign up for workshops and masterclasses leading up to the concerts on Saturday and Sunday. Participating choirs include locals Mount Royal Kantorei, Spiritus Chamber Choir, Calgary Men’s Chorus, Cantares Latin Choir. the Concino Chorus, the Western Canada High School Choir and the Youth Singers of Calgary. Lethbridge’s Ventus Women’s Choice and Les Petits Chanteurs de Laval of Quebec will also be participating.
All nine choirs will be performing on Saturday, both en masse and individually. On Sunday, five choirs will perform. The commissioned pieces by Runestad and Rist will be performed on both nights.
Born in Rockford, IL., Runestad has been composing since he was in high school. He grew up in a family that was both musical and socially conscious, something that has been reflected in his canon of work. In 2022, his Earth Symphony earned an Emmy Award for Musical Composition. His 2019 debut album, The Hope of Loving: Choral Music of Jake Runestad, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance.
Runestad composed Ritual for choir, piano and two percussionists and describes it as an “exploration of those rituals we have in our culture that we are blindly following and maybe we should reassess because they’ve been around for so long and don’t necessarily serve us.”
Interestingly, the piece doesn’t contain any words in the narrative.
“I’ve created a fake language in a way, but it’s really just sound,” he says. “It tries to depict a journey of someone who is trying to interrupt a ritualistic behaviour that should be rethought, but essentially the mob doesn’t allow this fellow to have a voice and comes back in and takes over.”
In his past work, Runestad has tackled issues such as immigration, gender equality, disabilities, grief, suicide prevention and the climate crisis.
“I grew up in a family that was really dedicated to service to others,” he says. “When I was a kid, we would bring people a meal if they needed it and would volunteer for lots of different things. We would help people rebuild their homes and would give to soup kitchens. There was always this focus on giving to others. When I really got serious about creating music, it was a marriage of those two aspects of my life.
“I really think of composing and creating music as not just as creating sound. What does it mean to create a piece for choir? A choir is a community. How do I bring that community together around something that is important? So I try to focus on themes of what it means to be a human in the world today, what it means to grieve, what it means to have joy, what it means to suffer from depression and to think about our relationship with the Earth.”
John Morgan, artistic director of the Kantorei Choral Festival and Mount Royal Kantorei Choir, says choral music has often focused on timely social issues. During the pandemic, Mount Royal Kantorei, which now has 83 members, released a video singing Runestad’s Please Stay in late 2020, a composition about suicide prevention.
“I find that with choral music, because of the text, we are able to touch on issues like that,” he says. “It’s contemporary choral music but it’s all very accessible. For instance, one of the pieces we’re doing is the late Ian Tyson’s Four Strong Winds. We are able to talk about things that are happening in the world right now.”
Morgan is also the artistic director of the pop choir Revv52, vocal director of the Young Canadians and music director and organizer at St. Anthony’s Church.
He says participation in choirs is on the rise in Calgary, particularly since the pandemic. He hopes the festival will become an annual event.
“Our numbers have just exploded,” Morgan says. “People are looking to bring this back into their lives in a big way. Not every organization that existed before COVID is still around. So some organizations are in rebuild mode. But Kantorei, specifically, did so many music videos over COVID and individual private lessons. Our members recorded in studios separately and individually, making us all a lot stronger. So, yeah, there’s a big resurgence in choral music and this is the first time we are coming back with this many singers in one space, celebrating the fact that we can do that again.“
The Kantorei Choral Festival Gala Concerts will be held at the Bella Concert Hall at Mount Royal University on April 15 and 16 at 7 p.m. Visit tickets.mru.ca
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