A message from Dr Joel Navarro Dear friends of PsalmiDeo Chorale, Greetings and welcome to our concert, Whispers of Light, Visions of Hope. You could have been someplace else tonight. Instead, you chose to be with us. For that we are deeply grateful. We sense that all of us have arrived in this hall with a sense of relief away from the world outside. There is a prevailing sense of busyness and tizzy in this cosmopolitan city, a pace that makes us feel harried and less human—everyone else is experiencing it so we might as well put up with it. There might be a voice inside of us that begs the question, “Am I really born for all this? Surely, there is something better.” This question must have been at the base of a people’s heart-cry thousands of years ago when they were waiting, painfully and longingly, for someone that would take them away from a life of misery, bondage, and homelessness. To people of a certain faith who commemorate that season of waiting, Advent allows them to deeply appreciate the Messiah they had long expected for hundreds of years. This expectation translates meaningfully in music. The late composer, author, and philosopher, Leonard. B. Meyer, whose influential work on Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) put forth the thesis that emotion in music can be understood in the light of psychological theory of all emotion: Affect is created when the tendency to respond is inhibited or blocked. As a people who find ways to cope with the tensions of expectation, delayed gratification, and unanswered longing, the themes of Hope, Faith, Joy, and Peace emerge as ready companions in our life journey. Without their faint whispers nor blurry visions, our lives would be doomed to disparagement, discontent, and disrepair. Bengali poet and polymath Rabindranath Tagore’s line suggests that even in the darkest of nights, the song of the bird gives us reason to hope: Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark. We extend our hands to you, fellow life travelers. We offer you our songs of Light and Hope to be your companions as you journey through the night, walk those deep valleys, and stumble through caverns where the silence can yawn greatly in the soul. May our songs light your torches. Sincerely, for the PsalmiDeo Chorale,
Dr. Joel Navarro Conductor 5
Whispers of Light, Visions of Hope: An Advent Concert