Pictured: Back Row – Charlotte Grundstrom, Beth Goodfellow, Lisa Drohan, Linda Del Duca, Colleen Smith, Santa, Jeanne Lodge, Wilma Delp, Glenn Carr, Krista Herling, Vicki Stebbins
Front Row – Suzanne Carr, Amy Kerker, Susan Ballinger, Deborah Briggs, Karen Zanol
Now that our choir has been together for a number of years, 2019 offered up some very special events. In previous years I called event organizers or venue event planners to ask if we could play. You can see from the picture above that we played for shoppers at the mall during Christmas time. However, now people have started calling us and 2019 has been over the top with some new and unique performance events.
Our first special event had us hosting a Flute Choir Masterclass. Our guest clinician was Seattle flutist, Paul Taub. As his area of expertise is new music, we worked on a number of flute choir pieces which included extended techniques and then had Paul help us with their execution and our overall performance of the piece. Local high school students and community members came as auditors to the master class and we all made up the audience for Paul’s evening recital. Wow! What an experience for us. We had 16 flute choir members participate in this class.
Next, we were asked to be the “opener” as part of a pre-concert event for The Paperboys at a local winery. (Cave-B Winery by the Gorge Amphitheater, if you know Washington State.) Due to space considerations, a subset of the choir – a double quartet – played as different tour groups came through the barrel room. We prepared four quartets and assigned parts so that everyone played different parts on each piece. Tour groups moved between three different sites on the property each with live music. The winemaker gave a number of short talks about different wines as the groups came through the barrel cave where we were to play. We played one of our pieces in between each of the talks so tour groups heard them all. The first three tour groups which came through the barrel room really enjoyed seeing eight flutists and hearing music played in the acoustics of the barrel cave. We made quite a sight all standing, dressed in black and white and with our performance banners hanging on our music stands. The fourth and final tour group REALLY enjoyed our music. They had already had three flights of wine and were so loud you could not actually hear us playing, and we could not hear each other. We just moved to be able to see each other and played on. It was a lot of fun and a great new type of gig for us.
Fall brought another first time event, a Flute Choir Day at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington. CWU’s flute choir, our choir – the Columbia River Community Flute Choir from Wenatchee, Washington and the Yakima, Washington Flute Choir got together for some playing, social time and sight reading. About 37 flutists playing piccolo to contra-bass. Putting three choirs together to play some music was such a fabulous experience, especially for those who have never played the final mass choir number at the National Flute Association Annual Convention. The late afternoon concert was attended by students, faculty and community members and held in Central’s beautiful concert hall. Thank you to Dr. Hal Ott for organizing.
Good luck with your flute choir events. Be creative, and have fun!!