Welcome to Wings of Song!

As the nation’s semiquincentennial year draws to a close, the community chorus Wings of Song offers a rousing celebration of our nation’s Christmas music over the past 250 years, in two concerts: Saturday, December 12 at 7:30pm at St. Joachim Chapel, St. Anne – St. Patrick Parish, 16 Church Street, Fiskdale (Sturbridge), MA; and Sunday, December 13 at 3pm at Elm Street Congregational Church, 61 Elm Street, Southbridge, MA.

Wings of Song Music Director Nym Cooke, a long-time devotee of American music history, emphasizes that the phrase “250 Years” is no empty promise. The earliest piece on the program is William Billings’s “Judea,” very likely sung in Boston by the mid-1770s. And the concerts‘ time span reaches all the way to a piece written this year: Cooke’s “Carol of the Field-Mice,” a setting of  Kenneth Grahame’s poem of that name, from his wonderful children’s book The Wind in the Willows.

Inbetween these chronological signposts are all kinds of musical goodies to please the ear. Audiences will delight in the magical tinkling sounds of the original “Jingle Bells,” titled “The One Horse Open Sleigh”; they’ll settle back into old-time nostalgia as the chorus swings into “White Christmas”; they’ll sing along on “When Good Old Kris Comes ‘Round,” a musical-theater-influenced number from 1902; and they’ll have their funny-bones tickled by the chorus’s high-spirited version of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

Folks who come to these concerts will also meet some lovely and mostly unknown American Christmas pieces, such as “Herald” (1803) by John Bushnell, a resident of Saybrook, Connecticut; they may be surprised by the first form that Richard Storrs Willis’s famous “It came upon the midnight clear” took; they’ll be present at the first performances ever of “The Buddha Meets Christmas” by Wings of Song tenor Edward C. Bradley; and they’ll learn (or be reminded) that anonymous Black American composers of the mid-19th century wrote some of our most powerful music for Christmas.

Don’t miss this latest offering from Wings of Song, one of New England’s most innovative and just plain fun choruses! Admission to the concerts is free, with a freewill offering collected before intermission. As always, there will be tables groaning with free eats and drinks for you to sample in the social time after the show. Both venues are handicap accessible; people are advised to come early to be sure of a seat.

Wings of Song is on Facebook at facebook.com/wingsofsong.org; their website is at wingsofsong.org. For more information on these concerts, people are welcome to email wingsofsongchorus@gmail.com, or Nym Cooke at nymcooke@gmail.com.