Erin: Why I Sang

Since this was my last season as a singer with UCA, as my vocal cords stopped working halfway through, like it or not my singing with UCA is in the past. Therefore I switched the title to the past tense. No regrets. After 24 years of such a joyous experience I ask myself how I could have been so fortunate!

Music is one of those things I list on forms under “hobbies and special interests:, but it is actually as much a part of me as breathing. My parents both loved to sing and our family sang together in harmony — lullabies, old army songs, etc. The music was all around me and inside my head. It pretty much permeated my whole existence. It was natural for me to take piano lessons, sing in and arrange music for small ensembles, sing in choirs all through school ad get my degree in Choral Music Ed. My husband and I love to sing together, so our children grew up singing too.

When I was 25 an event of great significance occurred: We moved to Midvale and I walked into Sunday School for the first time and heard some teenager playing a Bach PReulde on the organ for prelude music! Then, to top it off, he played the Fuge for Postlude!!! During the postlude I left my 3 month old twins in their stroller by our bench, ran up to the organ and exclaimed, “Who ARE you?!?!?” Barlow Bradford introduced himself to me and I met the Bradford family. About 5 years later Barlow organized Musical Score. He had accompanied Bernell Hales’s choirs at the U of U and had also studied the hauntingly pure sound of some of the premier British choirs, which led him to develop his own vision of what can be done to achieve exquisite choral sound. I went to a Musical Score concert and was so excited about what I heard that afterward I told Barlow I’d love to audition when there was an opening. A few weeks later I was lucky enough to become one of Barlow’s “score” of singers. I was awed by Barlow’s instincts and tried to learn everything I could from him. Two exhilarating years later, Barlow left for California to complete his Masters and PhD and upon his return he and Jim Sorenson founded Utah Chamber Artists. You all know the rest of the story.