Conductor’s Corner

by Ryan Phillips, M.M., Music Director and Conductor

Each summer, I find some time (uninterrupted time is a hot commodity in our household!) to think about what concert theme I’d like to present with ARS each fall and spring. I’ll be the first to admit that I struggled to solidify a theme for the performance you’re about to hear. Each topic I explored seemed not interesting enough, too cheesy, or only encouraged one style of music.

Let’s rewind a few years, to when my wife and I were expecting twins and were setting up our nursery. She decided to go with a nighttime theme featuring stars and moons on the curtains, mobiles, etc. One of my jobs was to adhere three padded pieces of décor that depicted a cartoonish sun, moon, and star to the wall. For a few years now, every day when our three-year-old twins go to sleep, they ask us to “snuggle the chair,” which adorably translates to “sit in the room with us until we fall asleep.” While snuggling the chair and enjoying well-needed quiet time one afternoon, I glanced up at the padded sun, moon, and star. I thought, “That’s it – each piece we perform will have some representation of these three celestial bodies.” The only trick was having a program that wasn’t completely lullabies…

I do not overexaggerate when I say that I love each and every piece on this program, Sun, Moon, and Stars! Two have stuck with me for two decades after performing them in a high school allstate choir – Sleep and Nocturne; two I sang in graduate school – O Schöne Nacht and Ecco mormorar l’onde; two were performed as virtual choirs by ARS but not in a live performance – Light of a Clear Blue Morning and Ballade to the Moon; two that our audiences loved from our performances a few years ago – Sudraba Meness and For the Beauty of the Earth; and a few I’ve always wanted to perform – Abendlied and The Seal Lullaby. We hope you enjoy this very special program as we lift our voices to the Sun, Moon, and Stars!

by Ryan Phillips, M.M.
Music Director

What an exciting 40^th anniversary season it has been for the Arizona Repertory Singers! This past fall, we welcomed our largest audiences since I began directing the ensemble, and we have loved rehearsing and performing music that is “uniquely ARS.” As you know, this season, we selected nearly all of our repertoire from our vast library in order to showcase music our singers and audiences have been delighted with during our past four decades of song.

Over the years, a few of these selections have reoccurred in ARS performances, such as Lauridsen’s Sure On This Shining Night and Stroope’s How Can I Keep From Singing? Some are newer to the choir but played a key role in our legacy, such as Elberdin’s Cantate Domino and Gibbs’ Great Day, both of which were featured as virtual choirs during our 2020-2021 season. The repertoire you will hear in this performance means a great deal to our singers, and we hope they impact you as well.

With this anniversary season, we celebrate our choral legacy and the music we have brought to the Tucson community. In addition, we are excited to share the legacy of choral music across the Tucson area, recognizing the work of other choir directors that introduces young singers to the joy of music. As part of our gala celebration. we honor Julian Ackerley and Marcela Molina, two devoted music educators who have provided musical training and encouragement to young people in our community through their leadership in the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus, and the Tucson Girls Chorus. As a member of the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus, I learned the value of learning and understanding music at an early age. The impact of these two educators reaches people around the world, as numerous graduates of their choirs have gone on to direct their own choirs and bring music to those communities. The choral legacy of Julian Ackerley and Marcela Molina is invaluable.

We also look to the future of ARS as our choral legacy continues. In the fall of 2022, we sang There is No Rose, a breathtaking piece by Seattle composer, Melinda Bargreen. When we began discussing a commission for our anniversary, she immediately came to mind. We were thrilled that she was able to compose For All the Beauty set to a beautiful text she had just written which would perfectly complement our occasion; it seemed as though our match was meant to be! We are excited to premier this piece for you and welcome the composer to our performance where her work will be brought to life.

I want to thank each and every one of you for supporting our ensemble and choral music in Tucson. We are grateful to have had the opportunity to bring our 40^th anniversary season to life in such a meaningful and impactful way. We hope you enjoy the food and drink, the raffle, and most importantly, the music!

Ryan Phillips, M.M.

The 40th anniversary of the Arizona Repertory Singers is upon us. I continue to be proud of leading such joyous and imaginative singers. This 2023-24 season has brought a rejuvenated energy into our rehearsals, one that has facilitated faster learning and deeper musical understanding within each singer.

The repertoire for this Winter concert was specifically chosen as pieces that hold the most value for ARS and our audiences. Forty years of collected repertoire is an accomplishment in itself, and it is our goal to show you the best! Some of our current singers have rehearsed many of these pieces through the years, and some have encountered this music for the very first time. In our Winter concert, you will hear the luscious harmonies of Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium, the joyous polyphony in Sweelinck’s Hodie Christus Natus Est, and be ‘invited to a party’ in Abreme la Puerta by Cristian Grases. Every piece in the program demonstrates who we are as an ensemble and holds a special place in our hearts. All of our repertoire this year is about “Celebrating our Choral Legacy,” and we are honored to share the celebration with you during our concert.

Much has gone into the preparation of our holiday performances during this special anniversary season, and I would like to take a moment to offer my sincere gratitude for everyone on our board, various committees, and our singers for their tireless work and energy. Since we began preparations for the 2023-24 season, everyone involved has shown what ARS truly means to them, and I am humbled by their meaningful work. I hope you enjoy our performance and that the Arizona Repertory Singers inspires you as you celebrate this holiday season.

Whether we have children as adults, or recall our own childhood experiences, fond memories of youth exist for many of us. Present times have taught us about life, relationships, struggle, and the joy of music. We have all experienced a range of emotions in our lives that help us recall the amusement of childhood games, periods of sadness and grief, and the comforting embrace of a loved one while listening to a lullaby.

With KidSong, the Arizona Repertory Singers hopes to remind you of all your experiences of growing up and the importance of childhood, while including many different languages to articulate the diversity of our world. You will feel the joy of childhood games like tug-of-war in Ken Steven’s “Hela Rotan,” the joy of songs learned as a child in the exhilaratingly complex “KidSong” by Stephen Caldwell, and the comfort of lullabies from around the world including Paul Smith’s arrangement of a Japanese melody in “Edo Lullaby.” You will also experience the immense grief borne from the death of a child through Dan Forrest’s “Good Night, Dear Heart.” In a personal addition to this program, I have arranged the well-known Welsh lullaby “All Through the Night” for our choir. This lullaby was sung to me by my mother when I was a child and holds a special place in my heart.

On the evening of March 15, 2022, at our rehearsal, the singers hosted a party for my wife, Julia, and me with two beautiful cakes to celebrate the upcoming birth of our boy-girl twins, Alder and Aspen. Unfortunately, Julia couldn’t make the party because she had suddenly checked herself into the hospital over worries about the babies. With leftover cake in my backseat, I rushed to the hospital. The doctors decided to deliver the babies that night, and at 1:19 am the next morning, our beautiful twins were born. In addition to our two older boys, Christian and Noah, we were now a family of six!

I have learned a lot about children during this last year of parenthood. The feeling I experienced when seeing innocence, pure joy, and the sweet nature of a child learning about the world cannot be matched. There is so much love and wonder to absorb from the youth of our world, we hope this journey of KidSong will inspire and offer you a reminder of your own youth.