Composer and choral artist Saunder Choi has chosen the evocative title 'Where the Sea Meets the Sky' for his upcoming curated concert with the San Diego vocal ensemble Sacra/Profana. Choi draws inspiration from the metaphor of the horizon to represent his personal journey, identity, and heritage.
Composer and choral artist Saunder Choi thought carefully in choosing the title “Where the Sea Meets the Sky” for the concert he’s curating for San Diego’s highly regarded professional vocal ensemble, Sacra/Profana . “I wanted to highlight my personal journey, identity, heritage,” said Choi, speaking from his home studio in Los Angeles. “The image of the horizon resonated with me, because the horizon is always something that we look towards and journey towards, but we never really get there. It’s such a metaphor for life.”
Saunder Choi, an award-winning composer and choral artist based in Los Angeles, will curate Saturday’s Sacra/Profana concert in Encinitas. Case in point, he was the 2024 winner of the American Choral Directors Association’s prestigious Raymond Brock Prize for professional composers. He has created and arranged music and works for everyone from Tony Award-winner Lea Salonga and the San Francisco Symphony to the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Lisbon-based Orquestra Filarmónica Portuguesa. After his Sacra/Profanaconcert in Encinitas on Saturday, Choi will be in Orlando, Florida, to collaborate on his latest commissioned choral and orchestral work. The piece, “Invincible,” will be featured in a concert commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, in which 49 people in Orlando were killed.
Choi has been connected to Sacra/Profana since he met the group’s artistic director, Juan Carlos Acosta, in 2016. Acosta was attending a USC Chamber Singers concert. Choi was a chorus member at that performance, which also featured Choi’s arrangement of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors.” That began a decadelong friendship.Sacra/Profana is known for its emphasis on supporting the work of living composers. Aaron Burgett, Sacra/Profana’s assistant conductor, said the chorus has performed Choi’s arrangements and compositions on and off since 2018. “Saunder is a fantastic person and a good fit for Sacra/Profana because of the subjects he writes about,” Burgett said. “We give high priority to music that engages positivity within community. “A lot of his pieces speak to the immigrant experience. Another of his subjects is the queer experience. It makes a big difference when we show love and acceptance,” Burgett said.
Saturday’s “Where the Sea Meets the Sky” concert will creatively outline Choi’s personal journey. He was born in the Philippines to Chinese immigrants, who honored their culture and practiced Mahayana Buddhism. He left Manilla for Boston to study at Berklee College of Music and, in 2014, went to USC’s Thornton School of Music for his masters. Growing up in a Buddhist family in a predominantly Catholic country, the multilingual Choi said he saw “multiple iterations of the sacred.” He is now director of music at the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica. “I’ve been in that position since 2018 and it has shaped a lot of my musical journey and my values,” Choi said. “The first piece in the Sacra/Profana concert is ‘Blessed is The Spot and The House,’ a famous Baha’i prayer. The first line is:`’Blessed is the spot and the house and the mountain and the valley.’ For me, this sets the tone for the entire concert — that anything can be sacred.”
Choi’s composition, “Lakbay ng Agila” , closes the first half. It is this piece that won him the aforementioned Raymond Brock Prize. “It’s one of those one-time awards where if you win it, you can’t win it again,” Choi said, adding with a laugh. “Essentially, that makes it special, doesn’t it? I think so. “It was such an honor to have this piece chosen by esteemed colleagues and have Filipino choral music represented by the biggest choral association in the world.”
In what might come as a surprise to some, a piece in the second half of Sacra/Profana’s concert is by American singer/songwriter Josh Groban. Choi arranged the popular singer’s Italian-language song of anguish and longing for chorus. “When I was a teenager, I was listening to a lot of Josh Groban,” Choi said. “I chose his song ‘Mi Mancherai’ because there are moments, particularly being here in the U.S., when I really miss home. It’s not a constant feeling, but it comes in waves.”
Sacra/Profana’s Burgett expects Saturday’s concert to be varied and extremely listenable. “Saunder’s music strikes a balance between unexpected styles and singable and accessible songs you can wrap your head around,” he said. “It’s not to say they are easy to sing. It requires engagement,” Burgett said. “He writes enough parts to give a lush quality that the audience can hook onto, rhythmically and harmonically.” The centerpiece of the second half at Saturday’s concert will be a piece featured in a 2013 Smithsonian exhibit of AAPI art. “I Want the Wide American Earth” was composed by Choi, with text by poet Aileen Cassinetto, based on the works of the late Filipino-American novelist Carlos Bulosan.
The last two songs in the concert were written by Choi and his longtime friend and collaborator, Brian Sonia-Wallace.“Our Streets” is about the tight-knit community in West Hollywood, often considered a sanctuary for LGBTQ+ people. The other, “Message Out to Sea,” is a letter to their moms. Choi happily reported that his parents, who are visiting from the Philippines, are going to attend Sacra/Profana’s concert Saturday. “I came out to my mom first as a gay kid,” he said. “It was obvious that she struggled to understand what that meant, but that she still loved and cared for me deeply. This is my love letter to that.”
In June, Choi will be working with performers on a different kind of love letter, one to the victims and survivors of Florida’s tragic Pulse nightclub mass shooting in 2016. He collaborated with four poets to work on the libretto, with inspiration from interviews with Pulse survivors and witnesses. The June 19 concert, “Invincible,” will be performed in Fort Lauderdale by the Gay Men’s Chorus of South Florida and the Symphony of the Americas. They will be joined by guests from gay men’s choruses in Orlando, Miami and Tampa Bay. “I’m really excited about this project, because it’s one of the biggest works I’ve ever written,” Choi said. “It is a seven-movement requiem patterned after the Brahms Requiem and his humanistic vision,” Choi said.
The closing piece of Sacra/Profana’s Saturday concert contains a line Choi especially likes: “Equal parts party and protest.” “It doesn’t matter if it’s disco from the ’70s, Stonewall, the Pulse nightclub or the various places we get to enjoy today,” he said. “Queer bars have always been spaces of sanctuary and resistance.”
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Saunder Choi Sacra/Profana Choral Music Composer Concert
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