It was a lot of fun, and I made a lot of friends. The choir usually had about 100 people in the fall, and about 70 in the spring. One year we did Carmina Burana for our spring concert, which was amazing. Our biggest registration was for Handel's Messiah, and we had 140 singers. In July, 2000, fifty of us went to Ottawa for a July 1
st choral event. We did three small concerts and we were part of a 1,000 voice choir for Canada Day.
I joined in 1997, and in the spring of 1998 we had two big events. We had a concert with the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, who came to Whitehorse from NYC. That was a wonderful experience. We had two workshops with Francois Clemens and then we did a concert with his singers.
A month after that, we did "Voices of the Klondike". It was a narrated concert of 19 songs about the history of the Goldrush and the Trail of 98. All the songs were extant in 1898, except for two, written in 1902: Label Your Luggage for Klondike; and, He Is Sleeping in the Klondike Vale Tonight. We did our dress rehearsal in Haines Junction, 180 km west of Whitehorse. Our concerts were don along the Trail of 98. We started with a concert in Skagway, two concerts in Whitehorse, and the final concert was sung in the Palace Grand in Dawson City. (540 km north of Whitehorse) One of the songs we sang had been performed at the opening of the Palace Grand.
We had been invited by the Anglican Church to sing during their morning service. So, on Sunday morning, about half of us went to the church and we sang five hymns from our concert as part of the morning church service. Some of the churches cancelled their services so their parishioners could come to Saint Paul's. We wore our costumes and it was just as if we were going to church in 1898. The roads in Dawson City aren't paved, so the ladies had to lift their skirts to keep them from getting muddy. The church was built in 1902, and it was heated with a wood stove, so the church was warm with the smell of the wood fire. We sat just as individuals in the congregation, not together as a choir. This was one of our
hymns.
We also had costumes made from patterns from the 1890s. The ladies had blouses and walking skirts, the patterns came from the museum in Skagway. The men wore vests with black pants white shirts. A video was made about the tour, the concerts, the research etc.
The choir won a national award from the Association of Canadian Choral Conductors for the best production of 1998-1999. (The award is given every two years.)
This was not the full choir. Not all the ladies had finished making their skirts, and some people were still at work. The river boat, the S. S. Klondike is behind us.
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