11 Jul First Children’s Choir Concert Held in June
On June 29th, a rainy Thursday night, we realized an important step in a dream more than 5 years in the making. For years, the team here at Mission UpReach has been dreaming of a way to teach the future generations of churches how to sing in order to enhance our worship.
In March two of our volunteers, Dakota Nowell and Brittany White, started a children’s choir with two of the schools from our DESEO program. For the past three months, they have been teaching the kids the basics of music theory, spending two afternoons out of the week with each school. “These kids have come so far,” says Dakota, “most of them haven’t grown up singing and listening to music so we’ve been really trying to get them to listen to and explore their own voices”. For the past few weeks, the 30 person Children’s Choir has been hard at work in preparation for their first concert.
Dakota also works one day a week with a select group of boys out at The Moses Project. An all men’s chorus, “Los Bajos Altos” worked on preparing two different songs for the same concert. One of the songs was “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from the 1998 Disney movie, Mulan. An adult group from the local church also performed three a Capella songs at the concert. So on that rainy Thursday night, with butterflies in their stomachs, all three choirs performed stupendously. The concert concluded with all three choirs singing “Shout Hallelujah” in Spanish with all the kids singing in sign language as well.
That night, we experienced the fruition of a full day’s worth of setting up, months’ worth of preparation, and years’ worth of dreams. Our goal with these choirs is to “take back” a Capella music and even host nation-wide a Capella Music Festivals here in Santa Rosa. This premiere concert was the first step in the construction of a strong church culture of quality music.
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