My alma mater, Wartburg College, puts on a big music concert every year for Christmas. Called Christmas With Wartburg, it’s a big production that involves several, if not all, of the school’s largest music ensembles in a night of Christmas music (mostly sacred). This production was always a really big deal with a lot of work involved. When I was there, we did four performances: one at the college auditorium on Thursday night, usually the first or second Thursday after Thanksgiving, right before finals). Then a performance at a really big Lutheran church in Cedar Falls (a bigger town half an hour down the road) on Friday night, and then a performance on Saturday night at the Civic Center in Des Moines (which involved a three-hour drive). Finally we’d wrap up with one more performance on campus on the Sunday afternoon.
During the week leading up to Christmas With Wartburg there were a lot of rehearsals. The production pretty much took over our lives for a week, if not more (one year it got so intense that we jokingly started calling it “Christmas Required By Wartburg”)…and when it was all over, the world just felt kind of weird. It was very strange, having this whole thing occupy our lives and the lives of many people around us…and then we just had to go back to class the Monday after and get after the business of studying for finals and who knew what else. Looking back, there’s a dreamy quality to my Christmas With Wartburg memories. Three weekends of my life (I was not involved during my fourth year because of reasons, which may constitute a regret)…but what a handful of weekends they were.
These are performances from this year’s performance of Christmas With Wartburg. This first is the “Candlelight Carol” by John Rutter, which is one of the most beautiful things I know.
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Today: we sang for the Sunday service, then a few hours later sang two major pieces for a concert, which I plugged. I am EXHAUSTED.