Choirs Exchanging Song, Culture
Forty-eight music students, three professors and one staff member recently returned from Central America, where Westmont choirs sang and served with locals in Guatemala and Costa Rica. The choirs tour each summer, traveling internationally every third year. Westmont students emceed concerts entirely in Spanish and sang in both English and Spanish.
The tour began with performances in Oxnard and Westlake Village before the group departed from LAX for Guatemala City. There they sang impromptu short performances in the city’s cathedral, national palace and an evening concert with local choral group Coro Victorio.
“A standing ovation and encore closed the formal concert, but not the singing,” says Professor Michael Shasberger, the director of the College Choir. “At the reception following the program Coro Victorio initiated a choral sing-off, and for the next hour we traded songs and dances until we had to surrender and head back to the hotel to prepare for our travel the next day to Costa Rica.”
The singers passed coffee plantations, rainforests and waterfalls on their way to their first performance in Costa Rica, held at the Cathedral in Quesada. In between singing engagements, students took full advantage of opportunities to hike near a volcano and view sloths, crocodiles and other wildlife from a river boat.
They worked with the Costa Rica – U.S. Cultural Center, established in 1945 to promote goodwill and cultural understanding between Costa Rica and the U.S. The aim of the choirs’ touring program, according to Shasberger, is not only to provide students with performance opportunities, but to enrich their training as global citizens able to interact meaningfully across cultures.
Students performed in San Juan at the largest senior citizens’ home, singing to 300 assembled guests and caretakers in the facility’s chapel. “The wheelchair-bound audience was moved to tears by the performances of the musicians,” Shasberger says. “The students stayed and mingled with the residents following the program, and it was a delight to see our young people assisting and speaking in Spanish with their hosts.”
The final concert of the tour was held at the Cultural Association’s Eugene O'Oneill Theatre, with proceeds benefiting their teen outreach program. It was followed by a reception with the participants of the outreach program.
“We had an incredible cultural and historical experience there,” Shasberger says, reflecting on the trip. “I consider this trip to be a great exemplar of Westmont’s “global imperative,” as it served to both build and serve our community even as we helped to build and serve the communities that we were privileged to visit.”