Resonance Women’s Chorus of Boulder: The Light on the Land

Some of our incredible friends from Right Relationship Boulder will be performing in this beautiful concert performed three times: April 6 at 5:00 pm, April 7 at 3:00 pm, and April 13 at 5:00 pm. The directors have also offered to give RRB the space to make a short presentation and offer an informational table.

Resonance Women’s Chorus’ spring concert, The Light on the Land, is an immersion in the nourishing beauty of the natural world. “We say that Resonance Women’s Chorus sings ‘songs of social awareness.’ All of our concerts are variations on the theme of paying attention. They are our response to ‘now,’” said Resonance Artistic Director Sue Coffee. “We take a lot of time learning the music, living with it, and talking about it. I’m grateful to this particular concert for the way it has been replenishing me. One singer shared that this concert has been shoring her up as an activist, and I have felt the same way. We turn to the beauty of nature in search of organic sanity and in support of visionary activism.”

This concert has been inspired by the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass. She offers an inspiring re-framing of the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world as founded in gift exchange and reciprocity. We also ground this concert in the poetry of Mary Oliver: “…Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

Two works on the program were written specifically for Resonance. Boulder composer Gary Grundei’s intimate setting of Carl Sandburg’s Under the Harvest Moon is ingeniously based on musical material from J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Marjan Helms’ quietly ecstatic Salmon Run is about, in the composer’s words, “living and dying with faith in the goodness of both…faith so strong you’re willing to swim against the current…and race toward what calls to you as home.”

The program includes music by brilliant contemporary choral composers including Craig Hella Johnson, Joan Szymko, Jake Runestad, David Brunner, and Ola Gjeilo, as well as singer-songwriters Jane Siberry and Susan Crowe, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and more, with settings of poetry and text by Mary Oliver, Elizabeth Bishop, Wendell Berry, Carl Sandburg, Susan B. Anthony, and Dorothy Walters.

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This program is not intended for children; audience members should be happy about sitting in rapt attention for two hours. Much of the beauty in a program like this comes in the softnesses.