Goshen College Chamber Choir to perform “Mennonite Songs” Nov. 7
Concert: Goshen College Chamber Choir
Date and Time: Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2017, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Goshen College Music Center’s Rieth Recital Hall
Cost: Tickets: $8 adults, $6 seniors/students, available at the Goshen College Box Office, online at goshen.edu/tickets or by calling (574) 535-7566. GC faculty/staff/students free with valid ID.
The Goshen College Chamber Choir will present the world premiere of a new work for choir by composer Bruce Trinkley, with text by poet and Goshen College alumna Julia Spicher Kasdorf, on Tuesday, Nov. 7, at 7:30 p.m. in the Goshen College Music Center’s Rieth Recital Hall.
The new work, titled “Mennonite Songs,” features settings of poetry by Goshen College alumnus Kasdorf, for SATB choir, solo voices, and piano. The texts are from Kasdorf’s collections The Sleeping Preacher and Poetry in America. Trinkley and Kasdorf will be in attendance at the concert, with both speaking before the concert. Kasdorf will also read from her poetry.
“Mennonite Songs” was composed by Trinkley during a residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, in Taos and was completed in April of 2012. This concert will be the first ever public performance of this work.
Tickets are $8 adults, $6 seniors/students. Goshen College faculty/staff/students are free with ID. Tickets are general admission, but seating is limited, with patrons strongly advised to purchase tickets in advance. Tickets available online at goshen.edu/tickets or via the Goshen College Box Office or (574) 535-7566.
Poet, essayist, and editor Julia Spicher Kasdorf was born in Lewistown, Pennsylvania. Educated at Goshen College, she earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree in creative writing, and a Ph.D. from New York University.
Kasdorf’s lyrical poems, steeped in her family’s Mennonite background, explore faith, social justice, and cultural inheritance. In an interview with Melissa Beattie-Moss, Kasdorf described how motherhood has affected the concerns of her poetry, noting, “You’re both incredibly drawn to the small and the domestic, and you’re also suddenly very sensitive to matters of the world. Your attention is pulled urgently in two directions.”
Kasdorf’s poetry collections include Eve’s Striptease (1998); Sleeping Preacher (1992), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for New Writing; and Poetry in America (2011). She is also the author of the essay collection The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life (2001) and the biography Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American (2002).
The poetry editor for Christianity and Literature, Kasdorf also co-edited, with Michael Tyrell, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (2007). With Joshua R. Brown, she edited a restored edition of J.W. Yoder’s Rosanna of the Amish (2008). Kasdorf has received a Pushcart Prize as well as grants and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Arts Council and the Fetzer Institute. Her poems have often been featured on Garrison Keillor’s National Public Radio program The Writer’s Almanac.
She has taught at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University, and lives in Pennsylvania.
The music of Bruce Trinkley has been performed in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and China. He has composed incidental music, songs and choruses for theatre and dance productions and has written extensively for choral ensembles, including more than 200 arrangements of folk songs, spirituals and popular songs for various ensembles. In 1976 he collaborated on The Wagon Train Show, which played more than 2000 performances during the Bicentennial. Santa Rosalia, a cantata inspired by paintings of Fernando Botero, was filmed for PBS. Mountain Laurels, a choral symphony using texts by Pennsylvania poets, was written to celebrate the centenary of State College, Pennsylvania, in 1996. Cold Mountain, a piano trio, was commissioned by the Castalia Trio for their concert tour of China in May 1998. His opera Eve’s Odds won the National Opera Association’s 1999 Chamber Opera Competition. Cleo, a comic opera about the making of the movie epic Cleopatra, won the competition in 2001.
Recent works include The Last Voyage of Captain Meriwether Lewis, a cantata for men’s voices; One Life: The Rachel Carson Project, a multi-media work for women’s chorus, soloists, and instrumental ensemble; and York: the Voice of Freedom, a music drama about the life of the only African American on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. His operas for young people include The Prairie Dog That Met the President and Chicken Little.
He has had composer residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Ucross Foundation, and the Patrick Allan-Fraser Trust in Scotland. His works are published by Alliance, Alfred Music, Oxford University Press, Augsburg Fortress, Lawson-Gould, GIA, Hinshaw, Hal Leonard and Yelton Rhodes.
Scott Hochstetler, DMA, is professor of music at Goshen College, where he teaches in the choral, vocal, opera, and musical theater programs. Dr. Hochstetler is a diverse conductor, having successfully led church, school, college, and community ensembles, and worked with singers from novice to professional. Hochstetler also directs St. Joseph Valley Camerata, a regional professional choir. Under his direction, the Goshen College Men’s Chorus performed to acclaim at the ACDA regional convention in March 2012. Hochstetler regularly clinics choirs and has led groups on tours throughout the USA and Canada. Hochstetler conducted over 450 singers in the 2016 Mennonite Secondary Council National Choral Festival. With graduate degrees from the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, Dr. Hochstetler has studied conducting with David Rayl, Sandra Snow, Jonathan Reed, Jerry Blackstone, Theodore Morrison and Kenneth Kiesler.