Great Hall Choral Arts Festival

We invite you to join us for the seventh annual Great Hall Choral Arts Festival in Benson Great Hall on Thursday, October 24. Our guest clinician this year will be Twin Cities based composer and performer Jocelyn Hagen. Our event designed for area high school choirs runs from 1-9 p.m. and includes choral clinics presented by Dr. Merrin Guice Gill, a college major fair, games, dinner, and evening concert. Our concluding Festival Concert will afford each choir opportunity to perform individually as well as combined with all participating choirs on one of Jocelyn Hagen’s works.

Cost is $150 per choir. To register, please contact Kevin Shull at kevin-shull@bethel.edu.

Schedule

1 p.m. - Welcome, Introductions, Choral Warm-ups

1:15-2:45 p.m. - Choral Clinics

2:45 p.m. - Refreshments/College Major Fair

3:15 p.m. - Games & Giveaways

4-4:45 p.m. - Joint Rehearsal with Jocelyn Hagen

4:45-5:30 p.m. - Dinner

5:45-7 p.m. - Individual Choir Rehearsals on Stage

7-7:20 p.m. - Changing & Concert Preparations

7:20 p.m. - Choirs in Place for Concert

7:30 p.m. - Concert - Benson Great Hall

9 p.m. - Post-Concert Director’s Gathering - TBD

(schedule subject to change based on registration numbers, etc.)

Jocelyn Hagen

Jocelyn Hagen composes music that has been described as “simply magical” (Fanfare Magazine) and “dramatic and deeply moving” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis/St. Paul). She is a pioneer in the field of composition, pushing the expectations of musicians and audiences with large-scale multimedia works, electro-acoustic music, dance, opera, and publishing. Her first forays into composition were via songwriting, still very evident in her work. The majority of her compositions are for the voice: solo, chamber, and choral. Her melodic music is rhythmically driven and texturally complex, rich in color and deeply heartfelt. In 2019 and 2020, choirs and orchestras across the country are premiering her multimedia symphony The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci that includes video projections created by a team of visual artists, highlighting da Vinci’s spectacular drawings, inventions, and texts.

Hagen describes her process of composing for choir, orchestra, and film simultaneously in a Tedx Talk given at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, now available on YouTube. Hagen’s commissions include Conspirare, the Minnesota Opera, the Minnesota Orchestra, Voces8, the International Federation of Choral Music, the American Choral Directors Association of Minnesota, Georgia, Connecticut, and Texas, the North Dakota Music Teachers Association, Cantus, the Boston Brass, the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, and the St. Olaf Band, among many others. Her work is independently published through JH Music, as well as through Graphite Publishing, G. Schirmer, EC Schirmer, Fred Bock Music Publishing, Santa Barbara Music Publishing, and Boosey and Hawkes.