Journey to the universe and back again…

My education continues through the passions of the mixed voice ensemble music of Vox Humana. Held inside the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, Vox in the Stars was sublime. Despite that rainy overcast weather preventing the opening of that magnificent dome, the performance achieved heavenly proportions all the same. The night contained a galaxy of amazement from poetry and psalms sung in richly layered sound strata, to an uplifting and soulful encore tribute to David Bowie’s Space Odyssey and the bedazzling world premiere of Alouette Meets Her Maker - the story of the unfortunate and unwitting seduction of a decommissioned and adrift satellite named Alouette by a malevolent force that initiated her demise and a crash to earth. (How can sounds like that even be made by the human body? A mystery!)

The energetically animated director, Brian Wismat looked at times as if he was mixing up God’s own batter, stirring and cooking up an otherworldly feast. From the first perfectly sung note, I could feel something deep inside my chest responding to, drawn out by, these 24 ethereal voices resounding within that cosmically curved space. And I found myself weeping at the thought that this kind of big “B” eternal Beauty even exists in this difficult and often dire world, wanting to immediately share it with everyone I know and love. Ann Dale and I, Hilary Leighton, are beginning to deeply consider and write around the question, “Can Beauty Save Us?” (because it has been trying for millennia) and the night of the performance I think I was convinced, “yes”, as I witnessed (and was gladly carried along by) these vocal illuminators -- reaching toward eternity’s vastness through the astonishment that flew from their mouths in a wild complexity of song and star stuff. A special nod to our Registrar Peter Dueck who is one of these beautiful, devoted singers.