The Ad Astra choir has been given a new off-campus performance opportunity.
Ad Astra is OCU’s all women, non-audition-based choir, and in October they will perform in Gustav Holst’s The Planets with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic.
“In one of those movements, there’s a women’s chorus that are like sirens in The Odyssey, and they sing in the background. The background music is really cool,” said Tony Gonzalez, associate director of choral activities.
Kaden Mahle, music sophomore, said he is excited for his female classmates in Ad Astra.
“It’s a big deal,” Mahle said. “They’re going to be amazing, stellar.”
The OCU choirs have a long-standing working relationship with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Gonzalez said.
“Whenever they need a chorus, they’ll call us,” he said. “So, this year, when they were doing The Planets, Professor Von Ellefson and the orchestra director talked about it, and he said, ‘You know one of those movements calls for a women’s chorus. We could do it.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’”
Professor Randi Von Ellefson, director of choral activities, is in charge of Ad Astra.
There are four choirs on campus including The University Singers and the Chamber Choir, which audition in the spring. Those singers who don’t wish to audition, or arrive as freshmen in the fall, get placed in either Ad Astra or Chorale, the mixed gender choir.
The non-audition-based choruses have not always been organized this way. The format changed four years ago when Gonzalez came to OCU.
“We used to have all the women in one choir all year long and all the men in one choir all year long,” Gonzalez said. “But when I started teaching here four years ago, we decided to do something a little different. It’s really cool. We took half the women and put them with the men and had a mixed chorus of about 70 in the fall. In the spring, the other half of the women would switch choirs so that the women who sang by themselves in the fall would now get to sing with the men in Chorale.”
Gonzalez said this format accomplishes two things. It gives the women an opportunity to sing mixed chorus literature and makes class sizes more manageable. He also said the female students like the change.
“They seem to enjoy the opportunity to sing with the men and by themselves as well,” he said.
Mahle said he hopes Chorale will have an opportunity to perform off campus in the future as well.
“It will provide more opportunities for freshmen and sophomores that haven’t been in a show before, been involved on campus as much, or gotten a chance to show off,” he said. “It’s kind of a nice segue into being seen, not just by OCU, but by Oklahoma in general. Give me that publicity, I want to be seen.”
Ad Astra and Chorale will perform together in their meditation concert in February.
“We sing off campus, we sing at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cathedral,” Gonzalez said. “Beautiful facility, beautiful church.”
Mahle said he is happy that Ad Astra and Chorale have chances to perform.
“They’re letting the underclassmen shine a little bit more,” he said.
The University and Chamber Choirs sang off campus Sept. 15 and will again on Nov. 11. All the choirs sing together in the annual Vesper concert in December as well.
“It’s just a lovely concert,” Gonzalez said. “It’s more like a service because we have readings particular to Christmas and Advent. And then the choir sings, and our orchestra plays with us. We have our organ students and our flute choir, almost a whole department getting together and putting together Vespers.”
There is a fall concert Oct. 11 in Bishop W. Angie Smith Chapel that will be an evening of just Chorale and Ad Astra.
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