The Palouse Choral Society will kick off the performance season Sunday with a poetry-themed performance celebrating National Book Month.
PCS artistic director Matthew Myers said the group tries to celebrate National Book Month and comes up with a theme to unify the music of the concert. This year’s performance is titled National Book Month: A Triumph of Poetry and Music.
“This month, in honor of National Book Month, will feature poetry by names of very famous poets,” Myers said. “Sometimes choral music is set to some kind of minor poets that people haven’t heard before. We’re going to be doing music that is set text by … some of the biggest names we’ve studied in an English class for poetry.”
This performance will be the first performance of the season and the first time a lot of members have gotten to perform with the choir, he said.
There are over 80 PCS members this year, which is close to double the number of members two years ago coming right out of the pandemic, Myers said.
The group consists of people from all over the Palouse region with singers in their 20s through their 80s, he said. PCS brings people together through music who might not have interacted otherwise.
“It’s really exciting to see the growth of the group and with every new singer comes more connections to the community,” he said. “I think our audience could bring in some new people we haven’t had before.”
PCS member Ray Wallace sings bass in the choir, and this season is his first with PCS after singing for a couple of years elsewhere.
Wallace said he is excited about the variety of content the group has for the performance this weekend.
“It’s a really challenging concert but it’s got a lot of interesting songs that we’re singing on it,” he said. “Sometimes we have to sing in other languages and some [songs] have very rhythmic and it’s all really pretty … there’s a lot of talented people in the choir, which is very enjoyable to sing.”
The song he is looking forward to performing the most is “Little Man in a Hurry” by Eric Whitacre because it is a rhythmic piece and has a fast and exciting pace, he said.
Wallace said the idea for concerts is to get as many people as possible to go, and there is a wide variety of songs on a typical basis for this concert and others throughout the season.
“You just never know what you’re going to hear,” he said. “You might think you have an idea of what concert choir like this is going to sing, but it’s been a wide variety of things, so something for everybody.”
National Book Month: A Triumph of Poetry and Music will be at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Simpson United Methodist Church in Pullman. Bruised Books will provide refreshments after the concert, where people can sign up for library cards.
