Marge Harris
From September of 2018 through May of 2020, Sun Lakes United Church of Christ had as its choral director Erica Glenn. Erica led the Chancel Choir as well as the Hand Bell Choir, and during the COVID period, she continued to rehearse the choir on Zoom and created our Internet choir electronically on Zoom. Since then, she has continued to direct choirs both in person and on Zoom all over the world!
As choral director at Ho’olōkahi Chamber Choir at Brigham Young University – Hawaii, she began conducting that choir virtually since the world was still living in the COVID pandemic. Interacting with her choir members, she found that many had faced disasters and realized that her singers shared a kind of unity due to their hardships. When the choir resumed in-person rehearsals on the island of Oahu, she found that these students from so many countries had stories of hope, even in spite of their tragedies. As a choir, they started to share stories of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in Tonga, fires in Lahaina, war in regions of Ukraine, and Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. She decided it was important to honor her students’ losses and to celebrate their resilience, so she wrote her Worldwide Requiem for choir, soloists, and chamber orchestra. She emailed her former choir members to invite us all to join this venture, to rehearse by Zoom, then to join everyone in New York to perform at Carnegie Hall. What an exciting opportunity it would have been to join them!
The movements are as follows:
1. “Introit/Kyrie” – Ukraine (war)
2. “Dies Irae” – Tonga (Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano)
3. “Pie Jesus” – Philippines (Super Typhoon Haiyan)
4. “Sanctus” (the western world’s obliviousness)
5. “Agnus Dei” – Palestine (famine)
6. “Libera Me” – Japan (the Tōhoku earthquake/tsunami)
7. “In Paradisum” – Hawaii (the fires in Lahaina)
The singers in the Ho’olōkahi Chamber Choir represent over 20 native languages and include survivors of four of these six disasters. They assisted with the translation of the original Latin into their native languages and provided eyewitness survivor accounts. It is Erica’s belief that the Requiem symbolizes hope and unity across cultures.
As a Fulbright Scholar and American Councils grantee who conducted musicological research in Eastern Europe, she believes in the unifying power of music. Choral singing can express solidarity across geographic divides and can connect cultures and heal the wounds of disaster.
It is her hope that we will use music to heal the world by seeking to understand and tell each other’s stories.
As reported in the April 29, 2025, Meridian Magazine