Alan Zabriskie and Carolyn Cruse join the Front Row to talk about their upcoming concert at Texas Tech’s Hemmle Recital Hall this weekend.
Coming up this Saturday is a concert with the University Choir and the TTU Women’s Chorale. Tell us about the University Choir and the concert that will be taking place.
Zabriskie: What I’m most excited about is this is the first full concert that I’ll be giving with the University Choir. The theme of the concert is to celebrate singing. Really the title of the concert is, “All We Are, We Have Found in Song,” which is a line from one of the pieces. Each of the texts that we are singing will have some sort of a connection to that theme of why we like to do what we do, which is sing and create music.
So, we’re going to sing a variety of pieces from different periods, from the Baroque period to the twentieth century. Most of all we would like to come across with our message that we are here to sing, here to do it together and we’re here to invite the audience in to our experience on stage with us.
Dr. Cruse, this is your first time on the Front Row. Tell us a little bit about you and your work with the TTU Women’s Choral.
Cruse: I’ve actually been here, this is my tenth year at the university. The Women’s Chorale has been involved in many performances throughout the years. We did perform at a regional conference in 2012, the Southwest American Choral Director’s Association Convention, which happened to be in Dallas that spring. So we had the pleasure of performing.
The women’s chorale is an auditioned ensemble, it’s not like other women’s choirs in other universities, in that it’s not simply an ensemble of women who were not chosen for other ensembles. So we have many former, all-state women choir members, many singers who are not music majors but performed in their varsity choirs in high school, and had the opportunity to sing some advanced repertoire.
Listen to the full interview at the top of the article.
