Emma Barkley
Lantern Staff
Going along with previous themes, the winter vocal concert has a theme of “Present,” which will entail present day pop songs. The concert will be held in the 700 building at Butler Community College in El Dorado in the auditorium on Tuesday, March 13, and Wednesday, March 14 at 7:30 p.m. The concert will be less than an hour and a half and will have no intermission.
“A good concert should be like a good meal where there’s the meat of the concert and that’s the art music thing,” Professor and Vocal Music Director Matthew Udland said. “There’s the dessert, which is like the flashy thing that you enjoy in the end, and it all comes together to make a complete meal.”
There will be five ensembles performing; however, the Headliners and the Barbershop Quartet will not be performing in the “Present” concert. The Concert Choir will perform a piece called “Five Hebrew Love Songs” by Eric Whitacre. It will feature violin solos, a grand piano, tambourine and a couple of soprano solos. The Butler Ladies, a women’s ensemble, will sing two songs, “Three Little Maids” and “Weep No More” by David Childs. The A Cappella choir will perform four pop songs: “This is Gospel,” “Chandelier” by Sia, “Honey Bee” by Steam Powered Giraffe and “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons. The Chambers are performing a 40-minute master work called the “Magnificat” by a composer named John Rutter. This will be performed with a full chamber of orchestra, made up of students from Butler’s Instrumental Music Department.
“The Chamber singers don’t get that many opportunities to just do a concert centered around them, that’s exciting for me to do a concert that really celebrates art music instead of popular music,” Udland said. “(It) is rare for Butler and in this community,”
Cameron Cassida, a freshman Headliners, has loved music since second grade. Before coming to Butler, Cassida was involved in ICT Flight, a show choir that started out at his previous school, Maize High. He is now a part of the Butler Headliners. He says he is excited for the upcoming concert and his favorite part about the performance is that they have not done a show like this in a long time. He cannot wait to show the audience everything that the choir has been working on.
“Practicing for a vocal concert takes a long time but the outcome is so amazing because you get to be apart of a group people that love music just as much as you do,” Cassida said.
