Evening rehearsals for Park City Singers begin Tuesday, Sept. 12. The weekly practices are from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Park City Community Church.
Joe Demers is the choir director and while he’s just taken over the group in the last several years, the group has been singing and performing for 25 years.
“Anybody who's thinking about singing, we'd love to have you at we start at 7 o'clock at the Community Church off of 224 and we go until 9 p.m.,” Demers said. “And we’ve got registration that's occurring on that night and a couple of weeks after, and then we kind of close it off because then we got our numbers, hopefully.”
Ideally, Demers says, 60 singers will join them. They always need tenors and bass singers but mostly people who love to sing.
“I always believe that everybody has potential,” he said. “And if you think you can hold a tune, then we want you to come and join us.”
He is willing to work with new members to improve their singing by putting them next to someone who is a strong singer in that same voice level.
He says they also record each of the vocal parts and put them online where people can access them and practice at home. While he doesn’t teach participants to read music, he says many catch on just by following the notes up and down on the staff.
It’s $45 to join which basically pays to rent the music.
“That gives them the folder of music, and then we use that they use pencil in to mark the music and then we erase it at the end of the season, and they turn it back in,” he said.
The music for the holiday concerts, he says, is diverse this year.
“We delved into the deep recesses of the library this year, and pulled out a lot of different pieces we haven't done in a long time,” he said. “For instance, we've got a piece that combines the Nutcracker and ‘Jingle Bells,’ and it's really cute,” he said. “I don't know when it was done last so I'm looking forward to that one being popular with the singers and the audience will enjoy it. And then we've got a couple of new pieces ‘Merry Christmas Darling’ from The Carpenters, and the African ‘Hallelujah,’ which is a really cool syncopated pleat piece.”
For new members, registration is Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. before the first practice. More information is in the web version of this report at kpcw.org.
