The Walsingham Academy Madrigals, a choral ensemble featuring students from 10th through 12th grades, have already got plans for New Year’s.
They’re going to travel to the Vatican to join the Sistine Chapel Choir during the New Year’s Day Papal Liturgy with Pope Francis I. They will also serve as the principal choir for the Cardinal’s Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica and will perform a concert featuring Christmas and American music in Rome.
“It takes months to prepare for this,” said Teresa Yoder, who serves as the choir’s director. She said the Madrigals are instructed in a broad base of music, starting with songs from the 1400s all the way up to present day.
“They’re learning how to sing in what we call polyphonic style, which is accapela,” she said. “It gives them a real wonderful, broad taste.”
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What is a Madrigal?
The Madrigal is a form of traditional music, originating from before the Renaissance. Performers who specialized in the style did not typically have instrumental accompaniment. Instead they relied on their voices, as the Walsingham performers do.
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This is not the first time the Madrigals have sung in front of a sitting pope — in 2011, they appeared before Pope Benedict XVI. Their other exploits include a performance at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2012 London Olympics.
They will perform two other shows during their trip: once at Assisi, where the Pope’s namesake originated, and again before the Pope and the Vatican Guard.
The concert featuring American music will include “Shenandoah” and “Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind.”
“We like to bring a little bit of where we’re from to the places we go,” Yoder said. The last concert in Rome was in front of an audience of 1,500 or 1,600 people, and Yoder said she is anticipating at least 2,000 in attendance. The last concert ended with a standing ovation from the crowd.
Yoder said she will select a repertoire of music that “will speak to people’s hearts” and bring “a message of peace and unity.”
“That’s the challenge for me,” Yoder said, “being able to select music in this time of joyfulness and finding something that will touch people’s hearts in their troubles and give them that moment of ‘wow’ and feeling that presence of the Holy Spirit touching them through music.”
If you want to see a video of the Madrigals’ 2011 concert in Italy, click here.
