When The Storms of Life Are Raging Rehearsal Strategies for Text and Meaning

BY NICKY MANLOVE

I carry a yearning I cannot bear alone in the dark–

What shall I do with all this heartache?...

Imagine what it would be like to dance close together

To drink deep what is undrinkable.

In November 2022,

the University of Arizona Community Chorus (UCC) opened our fall concert with Bernice Johnson Reagon’s Come Unto Me, a lilting call-and-response whose overlapping phrases feel like the embraces of long friends separated for too long. The text comes from Matthew 11:28-30, “Come unto me, all you who labor, and I will give you rest,” and later, “... all that are heavy laden.” This phrase is familiar to any who have spent time in Christian religious spaces, but for me in this secular environment, it evoked the question: what pulls us into singing? How do we describe what compels us to show up to rehearsal each week, and what compels our audience to listen? I posed this question to the choir, and their responses became a spoken invocation to our concert, underscored by a hummed refrain of Come Unto Me. Here is some of what we wrote together:

Come,youwhoarebroken Come,youwhoembracejoy Come,youwhoembodyhope Come,youwhodesirepeace mmUCC is an 80-voice SATB ensemble of both registered University of Arizona students and unregistered community members, many with no other formal relation to the University. This means there are many singers who I consider “well-choired”– those who’ve sung in choirs for decades under many conductors, and can create their own access to, for example, Christian sacred texts in Latin, even if they don’t belong to that tradition in their personal spiritual life.

My hope was that the simple exercise of asking why are you here? would create entryways of shared purpose, and organic opportunities for relation. I hoped it would catalyze a spoken or unspoken connection between singers; the prompt for a conversation that could begin, “I think joy is important too!” or, “The world is an absolute disaster right now, but I choose to have hope, somehow.” Perhaps just as important, these bonds from rehearsal became completely unique representations of our community identity in our concert and elevated an already transcendent piece of music to a powerful declaration of what we, together, believe.