Eugene Concert Choir

Reaching out to Eugene Concert Choir Alumni has been one of the primary goals of Artistic Director Diane Retallack in the past few months. She and Eugene Concert Choir staff and volunteers are preparing for their 50^th Anniversary “Golden Celebration” on Sunday, March 9. In recent zoom conversation with OAW the Eugene conductor was looking forward to sharing memories and conducting the combined ECC and alumni choir in “Movement IV” of Brahms Requiem, a work that has been performed numerous times in the choir’s long history. The alumni response? According to PR and Marketing Director Alyssa Morar 86 alumni responded. It’s a concert; it’s a celebration. It’s a choral family reunion.

But the Brahms is just one highlight of the Golden Anniversary program. There’s another ECC milestone to add to the celebration: this is Diane Retallack’s 40^th season on the podium.

Forty years ago the third conductor of the Eugene Community Choir took a study tour to Russia and asked Retallack to “fill in for a brief time.” Ha! Plans changed and Retallack was soon preparing to launch her first ECC concert around the same time she gave birth to her first son–while finishing her doctoral dissertation in her spare time. Happy and fortuitous story, but let’s rewind to the very beginning. Let’s hear how a culture of musical arts was cultivated in the community of Eugene.

“A place where things could be built”

In the late ‘60s Texas-raised Philip Bayles, then in his mid-twenties, was doing summer work in Idaho and took a side trip to a city of tall pines and rushing water called Eugene, Oregon. As he explored the city center, recalled Bayles in recent phone conversation with OAW, “I discovered there was a university down the street. There were the people, resources and expertise. It looked to me like a place where things could be built.” He jumped in.

And it was while he was taking a turn at conducting the Eugene Community Orchestra in the early seventies that the first seeds of a community choir were planted. In one fateful discussion, relayed Bayles, the Orchestra board asked, “If you could do any work with soloists joining you for a concert what work would you do?” His answer “Invite a choir–and do Messiah.” Only problem–there wasn’t a local choir to invite. The solution–build your own. And they did.

“There must have been 60 to 70 (singers) for the premiere,” he continued over the phone. “And that date”–papers shuffling in the background–”was April 12, 1974.”

“Thing is,” Bayles continued, “people wanted to keep going, make it a regular thing.” Weekly rehearsals of the great masterworks got underway.

In 1977 Bayles founded the Eugene Opera. As those opera duties grew Bayles let go of the Community Choir. His immediate successor in 82-83 was Paul Westlund, followed by Peter Jermihov. Jermihov – yes, some of you might recognize the name – took the “brief” study sabbatical to Russia and is now an internationally recognized specialist in Orthodox liturgical music. 

Bayles has remained in Eugene. He built his own skills, completing a Master’s in Composition from U of O. He doesn’t get to many ECC concerts. He’s busy conducting Eugene’s Riverside Chamber Symphony, a post he has held for over 20 years. Of the work Retallack has done over the past decades, Bayles–who proclaims himself “an old stick-in-the-mud who did Requiems”–says he is impressed with the quality of stylistic repertoire now performed. He’ll be at this upcoming event and will conduct a piece he composed in honor of the choir’s 50^th Anniversary. 

“They had to build bleachers”

Retallack didn’t “luck” into the conducting role. She prepared and studied, taking her Doctorate of Music in Choral Conducting from Indiana University where she studied with pioneering Margaret Hillis and choral scholar Julius Herford. Her knowledge of choral literature and style and her respect for life-long learning have been evident throughout the decades. 

As many readers will know, there was already some great choral music coming out of the University of Oregon. Royce Saltzman was on staff there since 1964 and in 1970 put on the first Summer Festival of Music which could become Oregon’s prized Bach Festival.

But the new non-academic community choir for folks of all ages and diverse musical abilities took off and expanded. In her second ECC year Retallack tapped the potential to offer literature more suited to a chamber-sized choir and created Eugene Vocal Arts. Say, that means another 50^th Anniversary celebration next year. Cheers.

By 1990, a multi-performance season of great choral singing now included a Madrigal Dinner, complete with papier-mâché boar’s head by Eugene musician and artist Jon Sutton. A popular event it was. 

Also that year the choir embarked on their first tour; over the years they have performed in Australia, Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic. They collaborated with Eugene’s Oregon Mozart Players for twenty years as well as the Eugene Ballet (for Carmina) and the Eugene Symphony. In 1997 the choir was named a resident company of the Hult Center for the Performing Arts, offering the choir a concert home in the city center.

It was to the Hult that ECC first invited Eugene-Springfield children to “Sing the Masterworks.” 700 children participated. “They had to build bleachers,” recalls Retallack who is particularly proud of the Choir’s continued outreach to young singers. Now called the EdOp (Education Opportunity) and led by Music Education Director Jill Switzer, EdOp enriched the lives of 1090 student musicians in 2024. Learn more about that very special program for 2-8^th-grade children here. 

In ECC’s video archives you can still appreciate their notable and award winning concerts – “In Celebration of Women”, “The Unarmed Child”, Joan Szymko’s “Shadow and Light” and most recently the groundbreaking “Black Is Beautiful”. Excellent quality productions.

For ECC’s commissioned Shadow and Light: An Alzheimer’s Journey by Joan Szymko the choir won the American Prize Ernst Bacon Memorial Award in 2016 for their recording with their newly-established Eugene Concert Choir Orchestra. The choir considers Shadow and Light one of their greatest contributions to the choral repertoire and Eugene Vocal Arts and Orchestra will again offer that work to the community on April 12 and 13. (Read ArtsWatch’s feature story about its creation.)

Further supporting quality choral repertoire, ECC has commissioned and will be premiering two new works composed for this Golden Anniversary. Eugene Vocal Arts will perform Buufis (Refugees) – A Child Cried in the Dark for cello and piano by Michael Bussewitz-Quarm. And the Concert Choir offers Eagle Poem by Zanaida Stewart Robles with text based on First Nation American Poet Laureate (2019-2022) Joy Harjo’s soaring text. Read Eagle Poem here.

In 2024 the City of Eugene acknowledged their own, awarding ECC the Fentress Award by the Arts & Business Alliance of Eugene. Cheers to the choir; cheers to a city that honors the role of choral arts in the joy and satisfaction of its community.

Guest artists from past seasons will be on hand to recall some of the stunning works from the choir’s five decades. And the choir has been collecting photos and video clips to give you a truly multimedia presentation. The choir’s beautiful website, one of the very best among our NW choirs – informative, welcoming and so visually appealing – provides the complete list of guest artists and more. 

The story of Eugene Concert Choir is one of awareness of culture and community, of learning and sharing and changing and of contributing to the growth of a vibrant cultural community. Brava.

Eugene Concert Choir invites you to their “Golden Anniversary Concert” on Sunday, March 9, 2:30 pm at their resident home in the Hult Center (Silva Concert Hall). Tickets and lots more information are here.

Willamette Master Chorus 

Salem residents looking for choir music in 1984 could take in the SenateAires Chorus (chartered in 1954 and still going). Stayton Festival Chorale (now Festival Chorale Oregon) had been garnering audiences from in the outskirts of Salem since 1979. And we must mention the Capitol City’s oldest choral ensemble (yup, still singing): Salem Community Choir, established in 1972 by Larry Weir, at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. 

But two choral music lovers from Salem’s Lutheran Fine Arts Council were having some bigger thoughts.

Mike Whalen, Willamette Master Chorale’s “unofficial” historian and a WMC founding singer, recalled in recent telephone conversation with OAW that LFAC chair Delia Miller and member Royal Norquist wanted to be able to offer sing-a-long Messiah performances to the Salem community. They had a plan but they needed a choral conductor.

Starting a community choir in the heart of Oregon’s capitol city wasn’t on founding director Wallace Long, Jr’s radar in 1984. Only one year earlier he had assumed his first college job, as Director of Choral Activities, at Willamette University. He’d only recently finished his Doctoral studies at University of Arizona and was ready to direct the University Choir and build Willamette’s choral program.

Whalen knows what happened next. “Delia attended a WU performance and immediately knew Long was the right candidate.” He quoted Miller as saying “He had the hands. I knew he was the man for the job.” Long signed on and the Willamette University Community Chorus was created.

In the Spring of 1984 fliers went up on church and community bulletin boards. Organizers believed the new conductor could create some energy and planned for about 50 people to show up. 151 folks showed up for the first rehearsal on September 18, 1984. 

The outside temp was 86 and the small choir room wasn’t air conditioned. Long and his wife Garnet, who was an alto in the choir before the two married in 1990 – one of two great love stories of the WMC, read on – laughed in a recent telephone conversation with OAW as they remembered how Long’s elbows were hitting the chalkboard as the new choir tackled a piece by Respighi. “What was I thinking?” asked Long. He was thinking of bringing great choral music to Salem and began by building choral tone and technique and auditioning the choir down to about 80. Sophie Kidder was hired as rehearsal and concert accompanist. Good thinking.

“He worked them hard,” quipped Garnet, but “we were all friends and it was a happy place to go.” The choir performed their first concert on December 12, 1984 singing Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Christmas Carols and Daniel Pinkham’s Christmas Cantata. 

They did not perform Handel’s Messiah until 1986–after which they reprised it, with Willamette students, every four years. For a number of seasons Willamette offered students a college credit for singing the great choral works in the free (until 1991) two-concert season. 

During Long’s thirteen years the choir reformed as an independent organization, in 1990 becoming the Willamette Master Chorus. The singers performed Berlioz Lelio with Jacob Avshalomov and Portland Youth Philharmonic in 1986 and 1994, and they toured in and outside of the US. WMC’s high profile and musical standard in the Willamette Valley and Oregon, and the list of grand choral works offered to Salem audiences are a great source of pride to Long.

By the mid 1990s WU now had four choirs; Long was named Music Department Chair, had been President of Oregon ACDA and was performing in Male Ensemble Northwest. He was also overseeing the design and construction of the new music building on WU campus. “Life became way too much and something had to go,” said Long. His final concert as Founding Director of WMC was Brahms’s Requiem in November 1997. But he and Garnet recalled the inkling that a University of Washington Doctoral grad, Paul Klemme–then Associate Director of Choral Activities at Washington State–might want to take a look at jobs in the Willamette Valley. 

“Paul was a choral professor at Washington State and we had lost the director of St. Paul’s Episcopal in Salem,” Long explained. Klemme was making frequent trips to Portland where Sue Hale was a choral director at Tigard High School. Here’s that second “choral love story” that is better told by Klemme who sent this email to OAW:

“I met my beloved Sue at the Oregon Bach Festival in the summer of 1995. We were married in 1996 and it became clear that I was the one to move from my academic position to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and part time at Willamette University. I arrived in 1997 and found my place working in Salem so that I could be with her, making our home in Wilsonville.” 

Last year was Klemme’s 25^th season conducting Willamette Master Chorus.

Salem’s population grew from roughly 89,000 in 1980 to 137,000 in 2000. Salem’s employment opportunities, public schools, outdoor environment and, yes, access to varied and quality arts and cultural opportunities, were welcoming. New facilities and programs were being built at WU and efforts to draw the community onto the campus were working. A true gift to the community was the choral-friendly Jerry E. Hudson Hall in the Mary Stuart Rogers Music building, dedicated in 1999, which would become WMC’s concert home.

In recent phone conversation Klemme described the relationship the Chorus has with Willamette University affectionately. “We are in the Willamette family, in and out of the curriculum. One of their missions is to welcome the community into their doors saying “hey, please come.” 

Klemme programmed the great choral works and broadened WMC’s profile in the Salem Community and beyond. The choir has performed with the Newport Symphony, and you can catch WMC performances at Mt. Angel Abbey. In 2004 Klemme was wondering if the choir might contribute musically to Salem’s Veterans Day events. To his surprise, there were no such community events. He produced WMC’s first Veterans Day Concert that year and it has become a cherished annual recognition of men and women in all branches of public service and safety. Read about one of those Veterans concerts here.

Klemme, the choir board and the singers so believed in the value of choral music to themselves and the community they kept their full season going virtually through the pandemic shutdown. Their virtual concerts were produced as a gift to the choir and community by singer Andrew Jones of Virtual Choir Solutions. The choir invites you to watch and subscribe to these high-quality concert productions of past and present concerts on their You Tube channel.

“A great crossover of cultures”

How has WMC chosen to celebrate their 40^th season? By learning and sharing music with the full Salem community and with their friends and neighbors in nearby Woodburn.

“We live in a place where there is a great crossover of cultures,” said Klemme. “In the Willamette Valley there is a strong and large Latino community. It is important to acknowledge the history and culture. To learn, respect and perform with them.” With, not for.

In two concerts at Woodburn High School on March 8^th Willamette Master Chorus performs with high school students from Salem/Keizer School District, members of the Woodburn High School Choir conducted by Luis Rivera, the Woodburn Mariachi Band conducted by Nadia Maksimov and composer/performer Freddy Vilches and the Freddy Vilches Ensemble. The concert is repeated March 9 in Salem.

Two works center the program: the Abya Yala Choral Suite by Vilches and Misa Criolla by Ariel Ramirez which will be conducted by Wallace Long who retired in 2020 after 37 years at Willamette University.

Abya Yala, the Indigenous name given to the Americas by the Guna (Kuna) people of present-day Panama and Colombia, includes Spanish texts by poets from Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile and Guatemala. The work was commissioned and premiered by Portland’s Resonance Ensemble in 2022. Watch that performance here and read more about it and about educator/historian/composer Freddy Vilches here.

The Misa Criolla was a critical and audience success after its premiere in 1964. It is a rousing and accessible work that will get feet tapping in Woodburn and Salem. Other pieces, some illuminating the era of Spanish colonization in Latin America, will be performed.

Willamette Master Chorus brings beautiful live music to its community, honors its people and contributes. Happy Fortieth to all!

Willamette Master Chorus with guest Freddy Vilches and area student musicians present “Music from Latin America” on Saturday, March 8, 4pm and 7 pm at Woodburn High School and Sunday March 9, 3 pm at Hudson Hall, Salem. Tickets are here.

Oregon Chorale

Internationally acclaimed composer David Walters is pleased to be returning to Hillsboro. He is excited about reconnecting with people he met at Portland State University as he completed his Bachelor’s Degree in Composition, studying with Brad Hansen, and his Master’s Degree in Choral Conducting with Ethan Sperry. And excited to see folks he met when was assistant conductor of Beaverton’s ISing Choir. And he is especially looking forward to reconnecting with Hillsboro’s Oregon Chorale and their current conductor Jason Sabino, fellow PSU Master’s recipient, who have commissioned a David Walters composition to commemorate their 40^th year of excellent singing. On March 15 and 16, the Oregon Chorale will premiere Walters’s new work for choir, piano and percussion, crave the light.

Oh, forget to mention – Walters is a genuine homegrown Oregon creative. He grew up in Gresham, attending Sam Barlow High School, before going on to his successful academic career including completing his Doctorate in Choral Conducting and Composition from Louisiana State University. He now lives and makes his life in music in and around Atlanta, Georgia. Read his full bio here. In spite of numerous awards the 42-year-old Walters admits to feelings of wanting to have achieved more, be more, do more at this point in life. 

How does he flip that script? By believing in his creative ability evident in accolades he has already earned for his choral and operatic works, like the award-winning A Voice is heard in Ramah premiered, after pandemic delay, by Portland State Chamber Choir. Watch and listen here.

He also believes that a commission like this – from a conductor and singers who know him as composer and friend and want to sing his music on their special anniversary – is a significant acknowledgement, an award in itself. “It’s an honor to write music for his (Sabino’s) hands and these voices,” he said in recent phone conversation with OAW.

His hope, akin to many composers no doubt, is that the musicians will digest the musical details and get to the point where they are communicating. Which is why Sabino thought it would be so helpful to have Walters zoom in to a recent OC rehearsal. From his Georgia home the composer listened, made suggestions, marveled at the piano skills of accompanist Ryan DeHaven and nurtured the musicians toward a greater understanding of how the music he wrote illuminates Walt Whitman’s restless text. 

crave the light, set to Whitman’s prescient poem “O Me! O Life!”, reflects not only what the choir has done but also what they are going to do in the future. “I wanted to write something about this 40^th,” said Walters, “that was topical; specific to their journey.” The poem “is so musical, builds through ‘plodding crowds’ and asks”: 

“Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?”

It’s an anniversary celebration concert. Walters’s premiere is a significant centerpiece in the program. But this anniversary will honor the musical offerings of the choir all the way back to the founding years. And who better to ask about that but the Chorale’s founding conductor Bernd Kuehn. 

Give a cheer for another native of Oregon. Kuehn attended Wilson High School (now Ida B. Wells Barnett) and went on to receive a degree in Music Education with Maurice Skones at Pacific Lutheran University. He returned to Oregon and began teaching for Gaston School District with an eye out for jobs at Hillsboro Schools. A choral position at Hill High finally opened up in 1987.

“At the time, about 1984 or 85,” said Kuehn in recent phone conversation with OAW, “I was thinking, you know, Washington County has a lot of folks moving in, partially because of the Intel expansion, a lot of them college students. And if they had musical skills, they sang in their college choir. On the possibility that that might be true I went ahead and advertised. I put fliers up around town and it got me about 35 qualified singers.” 

Kuehn auditioned singers immediately. “I kindly rejected a few folks,” he said – if you know Kuehn you knew he couldn’t do it any other way – “and it was a choir that read well.” And he put the singers in mixed quartet formation. Gutsy for a startup community choir but “it worked out very well,” he stated simply. Understated and genuine.

“He who sings scares away his woes”

Kuehn retired from the chorale in 2014 and after an interim conductor search season, Jason Sabino conducted his first OC concert in fall of 2016. Read about his taking over the Chorale’s leadership here. 

Sabino is delighted with the Oregon Chorale’s relationship with the Oregon Symphony, with whom they not only collaborate on a Christmas concert each year but have appeared on add-on concerts like the 2024 “Heroes: A Video Game Symphony.” (Video here). In a conversation over coffee with OAW Sabino proclaimed himself an avid gamer nerd. “I was playing those games at 7,” he said gleefully. These concerts put the Chorale in front of a wider appreciative audience.

Sabino’s enthusiasm continued as he described how pleased he is that the voice of the choir is being welcomed in the Hillsboro Arts and Culture Council discussions. The fast-growing city, one of the tall trees in Oregon’s Silicon Forest, appreciates and is nurturing the arts as essential to the healthy growth of their community. 

Here’s what Nancy Nye, Senior Manager of Arts, Culture and Events for the City of Hillsboro wrote to OAW in recent email about the arts, music and the Oregon Chorale:

“In 1985, the Oregon Chorale began rehearsing in the basement of Hillsboro’s Glenn and Viola Walters Cultural Arts Center, and today it stands as the longest-running chorale in Washington County. To me, a life without music is a life without joy. One of my favorite quotes is by Cervantes: ‘He who sings scares away his woes.’ I love this quote because it perfectly captures the feeling you experience when you sing—it’s the ultimate form of affirmation. The Oregon Chorale creates a space of joy that binds our community together. I recently had the pleasure of hearing the Chorale perform Shenandoah by James Erb, and the blend of their harmonies and the depth of their vocal dynamics left me utterly exhilarated. The Oregon Chorale is truly a treasure.”

In Kuehn’s 30 years the choir toured Europe and offered beautifully-crafted choral music to his community. But Kuehn the educator and the OC board also initiated a mission to invite high school students to rehearse and perform great choral works alongside the adults. The “Emerging Voices Youth Outreach” was expanded in 2017 and Sabino, who now teaches choral music education at Hillsboro’s Century High School–coincidentally the school from which Kuehn retired–visits schools in Hillsboro, Beaverton and Forest Grove on behalf of OC’s “Emerging Voices” outreach. Kuehn also founded the Bernie Kuehn Music Scholarship given by OC to a local young singer each year, 

You always find Kuehn in the audience at Chorale concerts. He marvels that Sabino, the choir’s second conductor, now has a choir of eighty – “with a good choral tone” – and has enrolled so many young singers from the growing community. “When we first moved into Hillsboro the population was 25,000. Now it’s 100,000,” the founding conductor noted.

Indeed, Sabino has moved the choir toward new literature and new themes but also honors iconic choral works. In 2022 the choir presented Will Todd’s Mass in Blue and, in conjunction with members of Portland’s Maybelle Community Center Choir, a concert to spotlight mental health awareness. KPTV covered the story of “Of Sound Mind” here. A piece premiered in that concert, Just Listen, composed and gifted to the Chorale by Andrew Jacobson, will be reprised on this ruby anniversary. The conclusion of OC’s 24-25 season will be the lovely two-piano version of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.

The “Fabulous and Forty” concert repertoire will take you back and move forward with works by Elaine Hagenburg, Morten Lauridsen, Aaron Copland and Josef Rheinberger. And yes, long-time OC patrons, Bernie will conduct some of his favorites. Oh, if you want to touch base with Bernie outside of Chorale concerts you can catch him singing in, or sometimes conducting, the Intel Choir. Of course.

Join David Walters, Bernd Kuehn, Artistic Director Jason Sabino and Hillsboro’s Oregon Chorale for “Fabulous and Forty” on Saturday, March 15, 4 pm and Sunday, March 16, 4 pm at Cedar Mill Christ United Methodist Church. Tickets and information are here. 

Footnote

These long-lasting choirs are supported and guided by board members, staff and volunteers in so many capacities. These folks are in constant motion “backstage” and deserve a rousing round of applause as well. And cheers to donors, sponsors and attendees who believe in the value of the choral arts. Thank you all.