St. Charles Singers To Present NORTH AMERICAN MOSIAC in October

The St. Charles Singers, led by founder and music director Jeffrey Hunt, will launch their 42nd concert season with 'North American Mosaic,' comprising songs of different eras and cultural perspectives from the U.S. and Canada, October 3 and 4, 2026, at their home venue, Baker Memorial United Methodist Church, St. Charles, Illinois.

'Gimikwenden Ina' (Do You Remember?) is from Canadian composer Corey Payette's musical 'Children of God,' about indigenous Oji-Cree children forced into boarding schools to erase their native culture and family connections. Payette is a member of the Mattagami First Nation. The St. Charles Singers will perform Elliot Vaughan's arrangement for four-part choir with piano and drum.

It's one of eight works on the program that the acclaimed mixed-voice chamber choir will be performing for the first time. Another is 'The Bird,' by early America's William Billings, considered the country's first professional choral composer. Written in 1790 and based on Psalm 11, the score includes Billings' characteristic fugues, melisma, and tone painting.

New England's pioneering American modernist composer Charles Ives wrote 'The Circus Band' in 1894 while still a student a Yale University. It's a humorous, nostalgic take on a young boy's excitement at the chaos and exuberance of a passing circus parade. William Dawson's rhythmic arrangement of 'Ain'-a That Good News' is a lively 1937 setting of a timeless, joyful African American spiritual.

Florence Price wrote both the music and text for 'Resignation,' a quiet, poetic reflection on the physical and emotional trauma of slavery. Scholars believe Price composed the undated work in the 1930s. In 1933, she became the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major U.S. orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of her Symphony No.1 in E Minor.

Aaron Copland's 'Old American Songs,' Book 1, published in 1950, were famously adapted for mixed-voice choir by Copland's friend and colleague, composer Irving Fine. The songs are 19th-century folk, minstrel, and religious tunes Copland sourced from historic collections.

Composer, arranger, and singer Ysaye M. Barnwell is a former member of the African American female a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey In The Rock. In 'We Are,' she extols the transcendent value of every human life and the interconnectedness of all people. The song, from a 1993 collection, includes the passage, 'For each child that's born, a morning star rises and sings to the universe who we are.'

Concertgoers will hear Arnold Sevier's celebrated 1996 arrangement of Thomas Dorsey's 1930s gospel standard 'Precious Lord.' Sevier is music director at Transformation Community United Methodist Church in Harvey, Illinois.

Brandon Williams' stirring, 2022 a cappella arrangement of Daniel Iverson's hymn 'Spirit of the Living God' includes double soprano and bass parts for lush six-part harmonies. An Illinois native, Williams holds music education degrees from Western Illinois University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is director of choral activities at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Award-winning composer and choirmaster Craig Hella Johnson of Austin, Texas, says 'Reaching' is about 'cultural and spiritual separation and displacement as well as a soulful yearning to 'come home' to one another.' He says it was originally conceived as 'a compassionate musical response' to the 2022 Uvalde, Texas, school tragedy.

Kile Smith's 'Northland,' from 2023, includes musical settings of four poems about the immigrant experience by Jamaica-born Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay: 'The Tropics in New York,' 'America,' 'On Broadway,' and 'To One Coming North.'