I’m Trav’ling Through: An A Cappella Journey

Tickets: Adults $25 in advance/$35 at the door · Students $20 in advance or at the door · Children 13 and under free

Our season opens on the oldest premise in American song: a stranger on the road with a long way left to go. I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger, trav’ling through this world of woe.

The early miles are bright. Byrd’s Sing Joyfully sets Psalm 81 the way you’d sing at the start of a trip, before anything gets difficult. Then the traveler needs something to carry, and Sing Me to Heaven is it — a piece about music as the thing that speaks when words have given out.

Then the ground gets harder. Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus asks for mercy. Mendelssohn’s Lift Thine Eyes sets Psalm 121, one of the Songs of Ascents that pilgrims sang climbing the road to Jerusalem. Casals turns and addresses the road itself: O Vos Omnes, all you who pass by. And Arnesen’s Even When He Is Silent holds the line in the dark, on words written by a Jewish person hiding during World War II and later found scratched on a cellar wall in Cologne.

Then there is water to cross. Alice Parker’s Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal puts the traveler on the bank, hearing music on the farther shore, and Juneau’s Lux Aeterna lets the light through.

Which brings us where the whole afternoon has been walking to: home. Three spirituals, and in the tradition that made them, crossing over was never only a figure of speech. It meant heaven, and it also meant home. Great Day. Oh, What a Beautiful City, with its twelve gates standing open. And Dawson’s Soon Ah Will Be Done, about laying the trouble of this world down and going home, which does not so much end as arrive.

Come take this journey with us.