One YouTube video of the Yelm Community Choir singing “Hodie Christus Natus Est” by composer Mark Hayes landed the vocalists an opportunity to perform in New York City.
Distinguished Concerts International New York (DCINY) will host a world premiere event of a new work by Hayes and was looking for more singers to join the choir. The organization found Yelm Community Choir’s video and reached out to Director Warren Shaffer with an invitation to participate in the Mozart Requiem event.
“They figured if they were just going to pull somebody in, they’d like to have people who had recently performed works of Mark Hayes because those people would already know about him and be enthusiastic,” Shaffer said. “They were quite impressed with the performance.”
Six members of the 14-person Yelm Community Choir will travel to New York City to perform Hayes’ newest piece, “Kindness,” at the event on May 26 at the David Geffen Hall in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Shaffer said he expects between 500 and 1,000 people to attend the concert, which features choirs from around the country, as well as in the United Kingdom. The Yelm Community Choir, which includes high schoolers and retirees, is the only choir in Washington that will be participating.
“It is a privilege because they sought us out on the internet and found that we were an exceptionally good choir for the size and for the community,” said Shaffer, who has been the director since 2014. “It’s an honor to be asked.”
Yelm’s choir has never had an opportunity to travel to perform like this. On April 6, the choir will perform a concert at the Emanuel Lutheran Church in Yelm to raise funds to help with expenses. Admission is free, but a hat will be passed around to collect donations. The show will feature popular and theatrical show tunes. From now until the concert in New York, however, Shaffer said preparations will be “furious.”
“We usually have an hour and a half rehearsal every week, and we’ll be spending probably an hour of that every week preparing. The parts have already been sent out with recordings so that people can learn their parts at home, so we’ll be putting a lot of stress on that,” he said.
After DCINY reached out to Shaffer with an invitation, he began to reconsider the capabilities of a small-town choir.
“We’ve always just thought of ourselves as a community choir, and this truly came out of the blue. Now I’m having to recalibrate my thinking process about the choir and my concepts of the choir because this stuff had never occurred to me,” he said. “I’m not likely to go seek somebody who wants to host us, but I have to think about traveling and about being a little more public instead of just getting together on Tuesday night. Now I have to open my mind a little bit.”
