For the 50 or so members of St. Peter's Chorus, it was a weekend of crescendos.Preparing and singing the music for their spring concert with Canadian composer and music arranger Larry Nickel will probably rank among the most memorable musical experiences of their lives.Not only did Nickel spend the weekend prior to the concert working with them on their selected pieces, he also rehearsed the song he arranged especially for them. Nickel also worked with the high school students in Humboldt Collegiate Institute choir and their director, Glenda Lees. Nickel, who leads choral workshops across the country when he is not himself singing with the Vancouver Chamber Choir or directing his own Jubilate! Chamber Choir, says he usually comes to workshops without any expectations."I listen to what's happening with the choir, and then I just treat the situation as if they're my own singers back home in British Columbia," Nickel said after one of the rehearsals. "I address so many different issues that come up in singing together, you know."You have tone quality, pitch, rhythm, and all the things that make music really work," the choral director specified, "and if I hear any issues, then I just address them. And I try to teach them a way to overcome difficulties."With 45 years of choral experience, Nickel says he has a bag of "Larry Nickel tricks" to pull from, and that sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. But the bottom line is that the work he does is ultimately for the choir's director."It's the director who has to stay here after I leave," explained Nickel. "If there's a couple of golden nuggets, even a few things that really work for her that she can apply to future rehearsals, then it's really worth it."It was St. Peter's Chorus's musical director, Maxine Moore, who brought Nickel to Humboldt. Moore says she is a longtime fan of Nickel's arrangements, and several of his pieces are in the repertory the chorus will be performing in their upcoming spring concert. But the icing on the cake for Moore was when Nickel accepted to take a song she chose, and make an arrangement for the chorus to sing.The choir's commissioned work is an arrangement of "Still The Song Lives On," by Clary Croft, a Canadian folklorist, singer and songwriter from Nova Scotia that Moore says she heard a number of years ago at a teen choir camp."I sang it as an unaccompanied solo to end my Music for MS concert three years ago," she added. "I'd always hoped to hear it as a choral arrangement, so when I received it Saturday, I was so happy. The message is so wonderful."Nickel says as a composer, the challenge in writing the harmony for a simple melody line such as the one written in the piece by Croft comes in choosing from an endless spectrum of possibilities as to the style or harmonic sounds that can be created."There's one really cool note in this piece and it stands out," Nickel said. "In fact, it's that one note that makes the whole song. After the first time you hear it, you sort of wait for that one note and you learn to anticipate it."The music arranger says that when he gets commissioned to write a piece, he wants it to be a guaranteed success for the director and for the choir."It's got to be something that's going to connect with their audience," he surmised. "Something that people will hum as they leave this place, that kind of a piece, right? So that's what I aimed for this time, something that Humboldt audiences could relate to." The chorus, under the direction of Maxine Moore, and with special guest artist Gerard Weber, will perform "A Celebration of Canadian Music" on April 29 at St. Augustine Church in Humboldt.
