UF’s voice will soon resound in Colombia as the first North American choir to be invited to an international choral festival.
Chamber singers in the Concert Choir will headline the 17th annual Encuentro Coral de Musica Colombiana in Buga, Colombia, from Oct. 16 to Oct. 21. The noncompetitive international choral festival will feature about 25 choirs from six countries — and UF’s is the first North American choir to be invited.
It’s considered the most important choral event in the country, according to an email from Carlos Armando Perez, president of Corporación Para el Desarrollo Coral de Buga (or Corpacoros), the Colombian nonprofit sponsoring the event.
In 2011, Perez asked Will Kesling, the UF School of Music’s director of choral activity and conductor of UF’s Concert Choir, to bring a chamber of up to 25 students from the choir to the festival.
“For the man to come from Buga, Colombia, to meet with me and invite us,” Kesling said, “he must think our choir is good.”
Students from UF’s concert choir, a group of about 75 ranging from freshmen to doctoral students, auditioned in Spring 2012 to go to Colombia, Kesling said.
The selected students, about eight of whom are not music majors, will be accompanied by four staff and faculty members on the trip.
The chamber singers will perform at a concert almost every night in Buga and surrounding cities during the six-day trip, he said. The singers will also serve as the demonstration choir in master classes that Kesling will teach to all of the choirs, teachers and conductors attending the festival.
Attendees will unite for the final concert Oct. 20 to perform these spirituals together.
“I love making music with people all over the world,” Kesling said. “I love the fact that I can speak with them even if I don’t speak their language, because we’re speaking music, which is the world’s common language.”
To prepare for the event, the singers are attending regular rehearsals during classes Tuesdays and Thursdays with the Concert Choir, he said. They also attended a weekend-long retreat Sept. 14 through Sept. 16 to learn and practice the spirituals they will perform at the festival.
The Sunday before leaving for the trip, the singers will have a “pull-in rehearsal” to get the sound together as a smaller group on songs they rehearsed with the Concert Choir.
This will be the first international choir trip for Joyner Atiles-Lopez, a 20-year-old recreation, parks and tourism junior specializing in event management and a bass II singer.
“At first, my mom thought I was lying,” Atiles-Lopez said. “But now she’s fully behind me.”
Camille Lively, a 33-year-old first-year master of music in choral conducting student and one of Kesling’s graduate assistants, said international events are like doing a musicology research project.
“You can’t open yourself up to an experience like this without growing in some way or learning something in some way,” she said.
