By CHARMIAN SCHALLERLos Alamos Choral Society (LACS) will hold a brief “meet and greet” party at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 20, in the social area of the United Church of Los Alamos to welcome the choir’s new director, Steve Paxton.
Paxton holds a bachelor’s degree in music (with an emphasis in composition) from the University of North Texas, a master’s degree in music (composition and voice) from North Texas, and a doctorate in fine arts from Texas Tech University.
He was on the faculty of the School of Music at Texas Tech from 1981 to 2003, and he was department chairman of the Contemporary Music Program at Santa Fe University of Art and Design for 12 years.
Spring 2018 registration for LACS will be held simultaneously with the party on Feb. 20. Persons interested in singing with the choir may join by paying a $25 music fee and picking up a set of music. No audition is required. Membership is open to all singers, but the choir is especially interested in adding more tenors and basses.
Rehearsals for the spring concert will, in general, be held on Tuesday evenings, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., at the United Church.
The spring concert will be presented at least twice. Times and locations are not yet locked in. At least one of the performances will be on Memorial Day (May 28) in Los Alamos. Watch the local media for concert announcements in early May.
At 7 p.m. on Feb. 20—once the party and registration are completed—Paxton will hold his first rehearsal on music for the LACS spring concert.
The tentative list of musical pieces for the spring concert includes: U2’s “MLK” (Martin Luther King); the Alice Parker/Robert Shaw arrangement of “My God Is a Rock in a Weary Land”; Joseph Clokey’s “He’s Gone Away”; Aaron Copland’s “The Promise of Living”; James Erb’s arrangement of “Shenandoah”; Randall Thompson’s “The Testament of Freedom”; Oscar Peterson’s “Hymn to Freedom”; music by the D’Santi Nava Trio; and music by Caitlin Alexander, Sky Redhawk, and Seblue Cloud.
