Like many in-person experiences, Trinity’s orchestra and choir ensembles were severely compromised during the COVID pandemic. However, the past few years have been a time of increased performance opportunities and rebuilding traditions.
Caden Teliha, junior music education major, is a member of the Chamber Singers at Trinity. He said it was a good environment to be in while everyone worked on bouncing back from the pandemic.
“When I arrived here at Trinity it was 2021, kind of coming out of the COVID situation the previous year, and I credit choir here for being the large group that formed my friends,” Teliha said.
Julissa Ramirez, senior music education major, also recalls her first year at Trinity being affected by COVID. Also a member of the Chamber Singers, she said that she missed out on many of the traditions the group gets to partake in, like Trinity’s annual Christmas concert and Vespers service.
“When I first got to experience a Christmas concert, which is all the ensembles in the music department coming together to put on a concert, I was like, ‘Wow, I feel like a Trinity student,’” Ramirez said.
Brianna Heuiser, sophomore history and environmental studies double-major and member of the Trinity Symphony Orchestra, also enjoys when Trinity’s music ensembles perform together for the holidays.
“I always look forward to the holiday concert because I just really like that type of music,” Heuiser said.
Teliha explained that the Christmas concert goes with Trinity’s Christmas Vespers service, and is something that both performers and students look forward to each year.
“It’s a quasi-religious concert for the service that Trinity holds around that time, but we sing some really good and beautiful Christmas music for that,” Teliha said.
Heuiser said she is looking forward to the fall orchestra concert, “Night at the Opera,” which will take place on Sunday, Nov. 5 in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall.
“A lot of the pieces are really cool to play. … It’s really famous music and it’s nice to be able to play it,” Heuiser said.
On the choir side, Teliha and Ramirez are looking forward to more performances with the Chamber Singers, which requires quite a bit of traveling on top of their performances at Trinity.
“We learn a lot of music because we tend to travel within the country and outside the country for performances,” Ramirez said.
Teliha noted that preparing the choir’s repertoire for a performance takes quite some time, as the group usually learns new pieces for each performance they do. He said that if a performance is six weeks away, for instance, then four of those weeks will be going through the material and becoming as familiar with it as possible before spending the last two weeks rehearsing in the chapel instead of the choir room in order to get into a performance mindset.
“[We’re] really digging into the music as much as we can, picking out all the details and getting it as good as we can, and then we start doing some full run-throughs,” Teliha said.
One of Teliha’s favorite performances with Trinity’s Chamber Singers was when the group had the opportunity to travel to New York City to perform at Carnegie Hall during the summer of 2022.
“We had our own little time slot and performance to perform as just our choir, but we also prepared a very large piece, ‘Mozart’s Requiem,’ to perform with a 400-person choir that we were part of,” Teliha said.
Heuiser noted that above all else, she loves being in orchestra because of the group’s shared enthusiasm for music, and she looks forward to all of the year’s upcoming performances.
“We all love playing music and making music together,” Heuiser said.
