Echoes of Peace Website

We've moved!

Please visit our website from now on for Echoes of Peace Choir news and updates!

Find us at:

www.echoesofpeace.org

Sara Thomsen

Director, Echoes of Peace

Music For All!

Echoes of Peace Choir will be singing as part of the Kako Foundation's "Music For All" Benefit on Saturday, 7pm, May 31, at Peace Church, 1111 North 11th Ave E, Duluth. Free will donations will go to support the Kako Foundation music programs for youth in Haiti and Duluth. The program will also feature Rudy Perrault, Director of Orchestras at University of Minnesota Duluth, Elizabeth Nordell, storyteller, Kako's Choir and friends!

More about the Kako Foundation: www.kakofoundation.org

Harmony in the Park!

This summer, Echoes of Peace Choir will be one of several Minnesota choir's singing for Classical MPR's "Harmony in the Park" festival.  The outdoor choral festival will be in Minneapolis (June 5), Mankato (June 8), and Duluth (June 15) featuring different local choirs at each city.

Sunday, June 15 is the Duluth weekend, and the three local choirs performing are the Twin Ports Choral Project, the Lake Superior Youth Chorus, and the Echoes of Peace Choir. It will be held at Leif Erikson Park in Duluth, and starts at 4pm.

Echoes of Peace Choir practices for the performance are 6:30-8:15pm: May 20 and May 27 at Pilgrim Congregational Church in the fellowship hall, 2310 E 4th St.  Practice on June 3 and 10 will be on Park Point at Lafayette Square Community Center, 3026 Minnesota Ave.

Come sing with us or come June 15 to listen (and sing from the audience)!

More details about the whole festival:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2014/04/21/harmony-in-the-park

A Place to Call Home

Song, story, and poetry on homelessness and the quest to find home

The Echoes of Peace Choir's spring concert, "A Place to Call Home," will focus on the issues of homelessness and affordable housing. The concert is 4pm, April 27, 2014 at Sacred Heart Music Center, 201 West 4th Street. Admission is free. Special guests include Rachael Kilgour, Charlie Parr, and Kako's Choir, a children's choir founded by the Kako Foundation in partnership with Myers-Wilkins Community School Collaborative.

The performance is dedicated in memory of advocate of the homeless and affordable housing champion, Steve O'Neil (1950-2013). The evening will include an update on the Steve O'Neil Apartments (just across the street from Sacred Heart!) and ways you can support this and other affordable housing projects and efforts to end homelessness in Duluth and St. Louis County. See you there!

This activity is funded in part by the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council with money from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

Carry It On! Remembering 1963 Dreaming 2063

The Echoes of Peace Choir's November 17, 2013 concert and community sing!

Fall 2013 Choir Season Begins

We will be starting up our fall 2013 season on Tuesday, September 3, 6:30-8:15pm. This season we will be meeting at Myers-Wilkins Elementary School in their music room. The address is 1027 N. 8th Avenue East, Duluth (formerly Grant Elementary School).

More details on this web page:
http://www.sarathomsen.com/choir.html

The Heart of Echoes of Peace

The heart of Echoes of Peace is bringing people together through song

Story, puppets and poems, paintings and pictures

To sing in harmonious, cacophonous community together

The heart of bringing people together to sing is witnessing what happens, 

Beholding what begins, sensing what simmers

When a song is sung collectively

When we—in all our splendid, wondrous, irritating, frustrating and

glorious diversity come together to sing as One Voice.

The singing is not about the song

The song is a vehicle, instrument, passageway

To propel us, move us, shake us, beckon and break us

open to wander where our hearts want to lead

Present, Open, Aware, Engaged, Caring

Able to witness the wondrous and horrific world

 Around, within, and about us

The horrific world:

Where children are gunned down in public school,

Where entire peoples are targets of genocide—

Halabja, Auschwitz, Sandy Lake, Wounded Knee

A world where people are raped, lynched, tortured, kidnapped, killed

For their color of skin, religion, gender, sexual orientation.

Clayton, Jackson, McGhie. Matthew Shephard.

Homelessness, hunger, poverty, prisons

War, waste, oil spilling, honor killing

Invasion, denigration, degradation

There is no end to the bad news.

Our hearts turn to stone, shell-shocked souls despair

Stunned, inert, immobilized

Echoing a song is somewhere to begin

A song is a gardener

It picks up a shovel and starts to dig.

Tenderly tips the blade into the burnt and brazed, hard as hell,

Crusted, cranky, depleted, impenetrable soil

at the surface of the heart

Tosses and turns over and around all the scraps, remnants, remains,

All the crap, cruelty, and craziness

Amending, softening, sifting

Activating, aerating, enlivening

A song is a seed

It is not derailed, discouraged, deterred by gated, guarded hearts

It finds every shortcut, crack and crevice

It flits, floats, meanders, winds, works it’s way in

Wakes us up to what is and what can be

It will knock down the wall and fashion a bridge from sundered stone

Enter the soul’s secret garden

Subtly scatter seed

A song will not change a policy, re-write the laws, topple dictators,

End discrimination, stop deforestation

House the homeless, feed the hungry, heal the land

The singing of songs, the piping of poems,

The drumming, dancing, delving, digging, delighting, daring,

Beautiful boldness of art

Will merely crack open the hard shell

 of the dormant heart

And hearts awakened

are unstoppable

May a song, a story, a poem, a painting, a puppet

Tap you on the shoulder

Trickle to your heart

Invite you to Dance

Ripple, rhyme, resound

a pebble tossed

an echo of peace

Sara Thomsen, Artistic Director

Echoes of Peace