BY Adam Wilson

Scene Editor

And Houston Carr

Staff Reporter

Central music professor Vijay Singh didn’t begin singing until his senior year of high school, and never received composition training at all. This Friday, Central will be dedicating an entire night to the choral compositions that he has written in the last 26 years.

Central will be bringing together all of its classically trained choirs, as well as two Washington state high school choirs, for the 90-minute concert, which will range from sacred to humorous pieces.

“There’s gonna be a lot of variety,” Singh said. “I hope people appreciate that.”

The 26-song lineup will be entirely made up of songs composed by Singh – a concept he wasn’t initially fond of.

“I wouldn’t feed [my students] one composer unless it was for a specific event,” Singh said. “They have to experience a whole bunch of things.”

The event was pitched to Singh by Gary Weidenaar, director of choral studies. Weidenaar hopes to bolster the popularity of Singh’s music with the concert.

“When I [began teaching] here I realized that his music is sort of well known but only by some people,” Weidenaar said. “So I decided to create an event to help him out.”

The setlist includes works Singh has written over the last 26 years.  The oldest piece, “From Dust to Dawn,” was written when he was 22 years old.

“I look at [the setlist] and feel old,” Singh said.

The concert will have 256 singers, six choirs and eight conductors. Walla Walla High School and Union High School will be joining Central’s choirs for several of the songs.

According to Weidenaar, the large number of singers will keep the audience on their toes, with the variety of songs being played and with the constant switching of singers. For the final song, all of the singers will come out and perform Singh’s “Carpenters of God.”

“It’s going to raise the roof,” Weidenaar said.

Weidenaar isn’t the only one who is happy to support Singh’s future career. Kramer Rapp, senior choral music education major and chamber choir member, has been in Singh’s classes since Rapp came to Central. According to Rapp, this is the first concert during his four years that he has taken part in that the music was solely by one composer, which makes it really unique in his eyes.

“He’s a really passionate guy. His passion is contagious,” Rapp said. “I look up to him.”

Sarah Hemenway, senior vocal performance major and chamber choir member, also finds Singh inspiring.

“I like his intensity and his passion that he shows in all of his music,” Hemenway said. “Even if it’s not his own music that he’s written, any kind of piece that he’s conducting or a part of, he has this intensity and this drive to make the piece better.”

Hemenway enjoys personally knowing the composer who wrote the music she is performing.    Hemenway spent her first year at Central in University Chorale.

“It’s different when you actually work with [Singh] and he’s there to give you his views on stuff,” Hemenway said. “It makes the music easier to sing and more personal to you.”

Hemenway immediately fell in love with Singh’s piece “From Deep Depths of War,” when she first heard it four years ago at one of Central’s choir festivals.  She describes the song as intense, and is grateful she has the opportunity to perform it on Friday.

“It was one of those pieces that you listen to and it’s just like ‘I have to sing that. I have to be a part of that someday,’” Hemenway said.

Singh grew up in Portland, Ore., and first began his musical training taking piano lessons in the second grade. By the time he got to high school, he was playing “just about anything I could get my hands on.”

“For some reason, instruments always came easy to me,” Singh said.

His first experience with singing came in his senior year of high school. He combined his choir and band experience to earn the maximum money from a music scholarship, which he used to attend Willamette University in Salem, Ore., to get his bachelor’s in music education.  Throughout this time he began to truly appreciate singing over playing instruments.

“As much as I miss playing, the vocal thing for me became very pure,” Singh said. “It’s the first true instrument.”

Although he never received formal composition training, he felt that he had to compose choral pieces during his time teaching high school.  He inherited a bad library of “antiquated, cheesy” music, and knew that his students wouldn’t enjoy them.

“I found out I could maximize my students’ best attributes because I could custom write for their strengths,” Singh said.

These compositions led him to success at regional choir festivals, and many directors began asking for copies of his work.

He eventually pitched his work to CPP Belwin, a now-defunct publishing company, which published all three of the works he pitched. By his mid-20s he was already receiving royalty checks.

After he received his master’s in vocal performance from Portland State University, he spent 11 years freelance composing and doing other musician jobs.  This led him to have many different mentors for his composition work.

“It was trial and experiment all the way through,” Singh said. “It’s been a really odd, weird blessing and ride. I didn’t intend to do that but I’m pretty pleased with the direction it’s gone.”