The annual Carol Concert is happening this Friday following the Carol of Lights. Dr. Alan Zabriskie and Carolyn Cruse visit with the Front Row to share more.
Dr. Zabriskie, give us an overview of the concert.
It’s just an awesome event. Really, the purpose of it is to invite everyone to join us for the beginning of the celebration of this great season and to get everyone in the mood for celebration. The whole event is geared around that. We get to feature four of our choirs in addition to the West Texas Children’s Chorus, who will come and perform.
We will perform carols, both traditional and non-traditional, both from the United States and from England, and also from Africa. We’re featuring a couple pieces with harp accompaniment and of course percussion. One piece has an electric bass and so it should be a lot of fun.
Dr. Cruse, you too will be conducting in this concert, tell us what you will be doing.
I’ll conduct the women’s chorale…I’m also conducting all the choirs together in an Ugandan carol...The idea for this carol came about from a few of our graduate students in both music education and in fine arts, who are here on campus from East Africa, from Uganda and from Tanzania. They showed us this arrangement and we decided to use it and adapt it for our purposes in the carol concert and we’re performing that with percussion. We’re working on some dancing to go along with it as well. So, it’ll be something a little different and very exciting and also these students who are graduate students, but they’re also members of the choral ensembles, are excited to share the tradition of this piece with our singers.
Listen to the full interview at the top of the article.
