We had a whirl wind trip down to Concordia Missouri last weekend and Lauren only let me go if I promised to make a post about it.
My high school choir director is retiring at the end of the school year and the last home concert of the Singing Saints under the direction of Bill Gasau was on Sunday. I drove the Prius down along with Beth, Sam and Ben (who shall not be mentioned in the remainder of the post). We left at 1:00pm drove down to Concordia and had dinner at the Smoke House Formerly Known As Biffle’s. We ran into a number of former classmates there, so dinner was interesting.
Then we headed over to the church for the concert. There were a fair number of other former classmates at the church, so a good time was had by all before the concert as well. I would estimate that there were 600 people there. It’s a really big church.
Mr. Gasau had been directing the choir for 47 years, and they had people who sang in the choir stand up by decade. Lots of alumni. The oldest alumni would have been 65 years old. They also recognized former accompanists (always students), former choir presidents, bus drivers, people related to Mr. Gasau. It was swell.
I’m not sure who that guy is.
There are Muellers, Wisenborns and Mannings in that photo.
The choir sounded good, and all of the choir alumni went up to sing a couple of songs. I think it took longer for everyone to find a place than it did to sing the songs. I’m 95% sure that Mr. Gasau looked up during the first song, noticed me smiling at him and pointed to me and smiled. I knew I was his favorite.
Here’s what the whole big group sounded like. Sorry about the sound quality. No, wait. I take that back. I think it sounds pretty good for just sitting my phone down on the pew and letting it record. click on the little play icon at the front of the link…
[wpaudio url=”http://laurenandlloyd.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/20150315-195951.mp4″]
Afterwards there was a nice reception where I saw even more people that I knew. Following that we went to Kent’s house and then spent the night in Biltz.
Ha! I’m glad you said whether or not you knew the guy in that one picture. I wondered who he was.
That choir song will be stuck in my head all day now. I don’t know which part I would have sung if I was there. I sang bass in high school, but have since sung that song many times as a tenor.
Before the concert started, there were lots of photos taken from the area right in front of us, because it was a good angle from which to get the whole church without going up on the risers.
After the third person came to take a picture he asked if we were famous.
Wait. You were a bass and now your a tenor. Don’t voices get deeper after high school?!? I don’t think they have a category for me.
And what a wonderful event! How nice that you all got to go & bid Mr. Gasau a heartfelt farewell!
I really don’t know why I got higher. I just tried searching the internet a little bit, but I didn’t find anything, and I really should stop. I’m supposed to be getting some classwork together.
But now I’m curious. My short search said a male voice stops changing in his teens, until he hits about 70 when it starts changing again.
My suspicion is that you have always had a wide range and just didn’t have a reason to use it all when you were younger, but I’m really just making things up.
I’m very glad you went -- I’m sure Mr. Gasau was moved by all of you being there. I’m even happier that you wrote a post.