Three for ’23: Park Slope Singers concert

Join the Park Slope Singers on February 25 & 26th (details below) as we celebrate three 20th Century composers and their influence on the world of choral music.

Alice Parker, creator of arrangements for Robert Shaw, is best known for her work on early-American hymns, spirituals, sea-shanties and folk songs. She is also a prolific composer. We will perform ‘Heavenly Hurt,’ her settings of seven poems by Emily Dickinson.

Florence Price, a member of the Chicago Black Renaissance, was the first African American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer. In 2009, hundreds of Price’s compositions were found in an abandoned house, leading to a resurgence of interest in her work. We will be singing two of her original compositions and her arrangement of a spiritual that concluded her friend Marion Anderson’s historic 1939 concert in Washington DC.

Randall Thompson, a vast influence in the world of choral music, was also a professor whose students included Samuel Adler and Leonard Bernstein. ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ is Thompson’s setting of texts from Isaiah, a book of warning and of hope.

Singers have been vaccinated and will have tested themselves the day of the concert. Audience members should be vaccinated and should wear a mask.