Wild Asheville Community Chorus

Wild Asheville Community Chorus

Wild Asheville Community Chorus brings us the world through music! Joyful voices from here, channeled through Directors Suzannah Park and Nathan Morrison, poured into our ears the musical energies of four countries last night at their concert. Lifted voices lifted our spirits and united the near and far in song.

What Suzannah called “the wanting song” from Bosnia and Herzegovina took me to the village she visited last summer and made me feel how the girls standing at the bridge each wanted something so passionately. The North American Shape Note song Garden sounded with pure clarity the relation of the Divine to the natural world. “Songs of rapture raise” indeed! And the lines, “You have made me understand/that we must take the parting hand” conveyed a compelling poignancy through the simple lucid music. From the Republic of Georgia, WACC shared the rich singing traditions that have been preserved in their mountains, similar to the way the old Appalachian songs were preserved in our own mountains.

This concert was about “breaking ‘em on down, these walls between us,” as Suzannah had the audience sing. It was about no longer needing to go it on our own, but rather, claiming our belonging to something bigger than ourselves. It was about coming to sit at The Welcome Table, to which the traditional African American spiritual of that name attested.

This is peace work, bringing the flavor of another’s culture’s music to our ears and hearts. Suzannah performed the magic of forming one voice from many, and the singers who made that one voice urged us all, as the traditional Zulu song from South Africa said, to “stay together and move forward so that anything we desire can be accomplished.” How heartening it was to hear that, and to participate in this moving concert, right before the elections. Thank you, Wild Asheville Community Chorus!