Jerry Myers previews the year ahead for the Choir Program
BY: JACOB POLITTE
Managing Editor
It’s set to be a big year for the music department on the Meramec campus.
Longtime Meramec Professor Jerry Myers is very excited for the next year of Meramec Choir Offerings, and even more excited to get back to performing in the Meramec Theater following extensive construction work in the venue.
“So this fall, there’s a couple of instrumental concerts,” he said. “They’re still in the Student Center cafeteria because of the theater remodeling; we’ve been anxiously waiting for that to be done. As I’ve heard, that should be by the end of this calendar year.”
Myers is also excited about his choir students collaborating with other groups.
“Then in December, the one thing my groups have been doing, since we could start doing concerts again with other people, is performing at and with other high schools, joint concerts, other high schools with other colleges.”
After citing an example of running a concert at Bayless High School this past May, Myers continued, “ I’m making good connections with those programs that way. It’s one of those things that I’ve wondered, why have we not always been doing that? This December though, we’re gonna do our holiday concert at Nazareth Living Center, which has a wonderful chapel in it, some, some great acoustics.”
Myers spoke of other events, including an alumni choral concert.
“I’m in my fifteenth year here,” he said. “So all those all the singers that have been here, that have been part of the choir [program] over the past 15 years are going to get an invite back to perform. We’re bringing back one of our accompanists who’s a singer with the Tabernacle Choir now, and she’s going to do workshops. It should feel like a big, nice week-long event.”
Myers also spoke about a large project being worked on throughout the year, set to be performed in May at the First Congregational Church in Webster Groves, that will pay tribute to Matthew Shepard, a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die on a split-rail fence in October 1998. He died six days after he was discovered on that fence, at the age of 21.
“It’s very interesting when I first introduced this to the Chamber Singers, you know, most of them at 18, 19, 20.. they’d never heard of this, but they’re very familiar with hate crimes,” Myers said. “They’re very familiar with gay young men getting beaten. But they had no idea of the impact this event had, especially on that community. And that it was, I think it was such a shock to everybody worldwide. I mean, I was in high school, just finishing it. And so it was kind of an eye opener for me too. I mean, that wasn’t something we heard about on the news all the time.”
“So we’re gonna learn a big piece of music,” he said. “But I think everybody is learning a lot about the impact this has on people in society and all that is going to be part of the benefit of doing it over a whole year, you know, instead of taking six to eight weeks to learn a piece of music, like we do for some concerts.”
The project, titled “Considering Matthew Shepard” is being performed in conjunction with Webster University and Jefferson College.
“It’s quite a sizable piece,” Myers said. “So we’re actually spending the year on it. And it’s just for all three schools. It’s just for our Chamber Singers, and normally like the major work, the big work goes to the big choir […] So we’re going to try and do it a little differently this year, do a big work with the smaller choirs, because this is made for that kind of chamber choir singing.”
He continued, “It’s a highly emotional work. It’s also quasi-stage, so there’s a little bit of costuming, a little bit of movement for the choir, not anything like a theatrical production. Yeah. And we’re doing that at First Congregational Church in Webster Groves, which is also a very nice space for performance.”
Readers can follow the activities of the Meramec Choir and other musical groups on the Music @ Meramec Facebook page.
