Aurora Chorus in Portland marks International Women’s Day with special concert

Portland’s Aurora Chorus is an inclusive, non-audition women’s chorus that formed in 1992 with the goal of elevating women’s voices through the art of choral music.

Led for much of its history by renowned composer and conductor Joan Szymko , the chorus also emphasizes female conductors and composers as well. Rebecca Parsons has directed the chorus for the last few years and says one way this group is distinct from others is the simultaneous quality of the music and the community the women create together.

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day concert on March 8 is “Undivided” and focuses on the mental health of young women. Parsons joins us, as well as soprano Jae Douglas, who has sung with Aurora since 2018.

The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Portland’s Aurora Chorus is an inclusive, non-audition women’s chorus that formed in 1992 with the belief, as they put it, that “music can be a powerful instrument of peace – locally, globally, and in the hearts of all who sing and listen.” The chorus puts on a concert on International Women’s Day every year. This year’s concert, which will be on Saturday evening at Portland’s First United Methodist Church, is called “Undivided.” It’ll focus on the mental health of young women.

Rebecca Parsons has been the artistic director of the chorus since 2022. Jae Douglas has been a soprano in the chorus since 2018. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Rebecca Parsons: Thank you.

Jae Douglas: Thank you so much.

Miller: Jae, how do you describe this chorus?

Douglas: It’s a beautiful home for anybody who wants a community, who wants to sing in a really safe and wonderful way, a way to connect with the community in meaningful ways. There’s so much about Aurora that I could say. I won’t try to say more than that, but it’s a great place.

Miller: One of the words that you just said that struck me is, if you want to sing in a chorus in a “safe and wonderful way.” What do you mean by “safe”?

Douglas: Well, I think a lot of people may be a little timid about their singing voices, maybe sing in the shower, sing in the car, but the idea of singing in public or singing around other people can be very intimidating. So, as a non-audition chorus, a lot of women come with that experience. My experience has been that the very first time I opened my mouth to sing a note, I had all these voices around me that lifted my own voice up and made me feel like “oh, I can actually do this.” And in terms of learning the music, it can be a little intimidating to learn whole pieces – we sing off-book, so we memorize all the music that we sing.

There’s just a lot of encouragement and support from the music leaders, from our artistic director, Rebecca, to learn the music and actually perform the music. It’s just bolstering to be able to do it.

Miller: Let’s listen to part of a song from a recent concert. This is “Light Is Returning.”

Aurora Chorus singing “Light is Returning” [recording]:

Light is returning

Even though it is the darkest hour

No one can hold

Back the dawn

Let’s keep it burning

Let’s keep the light of hope alive

Make safe our journey

Through the storm

Our planet is turning

Circle on her path around the sun

Earth Mother is calling

Her children home

[Recording ends]

Miller: This is one of those times where I do wish we had a live feed, because Jae has been mouthing along. And Rebecca, you conducted this for the concert, you were conducting to nobody, conducting the recording. [Laughter] Why did you want to be the director of this chorus?

Parsons: Oh, easy. I love directing any chorus. I think it’s the best job in the world. But Aurora seemed like the perfect fit when they came along. I had just graduated from my master’s degree in conducting. And yeah, great timing with the retirement of their previous director. And it just felt like such a perfect fit in terms of our shared values, and in terms of what I wanted to do with this art form, which is to really build a strong sense of community, to be something that’s accessible but ambitious, to foster really strong relationships that want to bridge out into the community and want to do something really special in that way. So it just seemed like a really perfect fit in the balance of accessibility and ambition, and this core belief in the mission of what we do being centered around peace, strong relationships and community.

Miller: Jae, Rebecca mentioned this opportunity arose because Joan Szymko, composer and conductor, longtime director of the choir, stepped down after 27 years. What was she like as a conductor of this chorus?

Douglas: Just brilliant. Joan, she was the director that brought Aurora through, as you say, decades of growth. She’s a brilliant composer, so she really understands at a very deep level the scores that she has either created herself or has decided to adopt. And very exacting. I think one of the mythologies maybe around non-audition choruses is that somehow we’re just sort of doing easy stuff. And she demanded a very high level of commitment and performance. She would run a measure over and over and over again if she didn’t get the exact right sound she was looking for.

And so when Rebecca came along, that’s what we were expecting and that’s what Rebecca has done with us as well. We perform at a very high level and that came a lot from Joan. And plus, Joan just has an incredible sense of heart for the mission of social justice and making a mark in the community.

Miller: Why did you and other members of the choir choose Rebecca to be her replacement?

Douglas: I happened to be the chair of the personnel committee when we were searching. We had candidates from all over the world – Canada, Mexico, Australia, the U.S. We had a lot of interest in the position. And when Rebecca came in, she just brought this beautiful light and a very impressive level of command of music. She showed up with both of those and just absolutely wowed the committee that was looking at her, so we decided we would put her forward for an audition.

I laugh because it was so profound. We brought her in, she did this audition, others auditioned before her. And the entire chorus who came to perform with her for the audition were like, “No, we want her. We don’t want to talk about anybody else, we want her.”

Miller: And when you say audition, the audition is conducting the choir. So you’re doing the job to see how it would be if you had the job?

Douglas: That’s right.

Miller: And it was immediate for all of you.

Douglas: It was immediate and effervescent. There was no there was no doubt whatsoever.

Miller: Rebecca, can you tell us about this upcoming concert, “Undivided”? What is the big idea behind it?

Parsons: Every year, we do a concert for International Women’s Day. We try to center it around an issue that it feels important to women right now. And with this, I had in mind the youth mental health crisis right now that is particularly disproportionately affecting girls in pretty startling ways. I really wanted to center around the idea of the value of our undivided attention, which I feel is getting rarer and harder to keep together. And also, the title sort of evokes that sense of unity that we want to have, that sense of solidarity with young women that are struggling with mental health. The value of what we can do in a mental health crisis, what’s important to us. And one of those things is singing together.

I think that choral music, one of the things that I really love about it is it’s one space that remains in life where everyone just puts all the screens away and they’re actually just in the room together doing something really beautiful, almost merging into one unified whole. And I think that’s really important. So I wanted to call attention to that as a way to bolster mental health and to bring in guest artists as well that can join us in that.

Miller: What’s the age range of your members?

Parsons: We have people in their 20s, up to 80s, 70s. We’ve got quite an age range in our choir. On the concert on Saturday, we have two youth groups that are going to be performing with us as guest artists, which I’m really excited about. We wanted to center youth, so we have the Portland Symphonic Girlchoir. I think they’re middle school, high school aged. And we have a gospel quartet that are 14-15 years old. And they’re doing really impressive stuff.

Miller: Jae, I feel like broadly in society, there are fewer opportunities for intergenerational mingling than there used to be. Maybe religious institutions are a place where that’s still more likely to happen, but so many of us are siloed among people, besides maybe family members, who are more or less around our age. What’s it like to be singing with people who are in their 20s?

Douglas: It’s very much an equalizer, because we are all doing the same thing … well, besides the sopranos, altos, whatever. But we’re all singing the same music and we’re all trying to learn it at the same time. It sort of busts up that whole stratifying of things that age can do and it brings us together in a very equalizing way.

Miller: Let’s listen to part of another song. This is “Cradle of Dawn” from a recent performance.

Aurora Chorus singing “Cradle of Dawn” [recording]:

Sunset in my country, sunrise in yours

I feel you there in the dawn.

The forces facing us are terrible indeed

My hope may flicker in the night

But in the morning I will plant another seed

And while you sleep it seeks the light.

Go to sleep, welcome the night

I will be here in the morning light

Slip into dreams, you’ve done all that you can

I’ll hold you here in the dawn.

[Recording ends]

Miller: Jae, do you remember the first time that you sang with the whole chorus in a rehearsal?

Douglas: I do.

Miller: What was it like?

Douglas: So uplifting. I literally felt lifted off of the risers. Like I said, I uttered that first note and it was like being in a sound bath. I was just lifted up. Like, you sing in the shower, you hear your note and it’s “ehhhh” or whatever, but it was purified by all the voices around me.

Miller: Had you been in a chorus before?

Douglas: When I was a freshman in college, I sang for one term. So no, not really. I don’t read music. I read it a little bit better now. But I was very, very naive to the whole process.

Miller: What made you say, “I’m gonna do this”?

Douglas: Well, I’m 65 now. Eight years ago I’m still in my 50s. I was aware that my voice was losing some quality to it. I was kind of getting an aging voice and I thought, “I need to exercise my vocal cords a little bit more.” I used to have a fairly stressful job. I was in a particularly stressful time in my job and I thought, “I need to do something fun.” I think I googled “women’s choruses in Portland,” and Aurora came up. And just kind of on a lark, I found it.

Miller: Rebecca, the language you used before a couple times was that what attracted you to this chorus is that it is accessible, meaning anybody can be in it, there’s no auditions, but it’s also ambitious. How do you balance that? As we heard from Jae, there are a bunch of women in the chorus who don’t necessarily read music, many of them don’t have that much experience in choruses in the past. I imagine some do. So you have a wide variety of abilities. How do you balance really ambitious music with accessibility?

Parsons: There’s a lot going on there. Part of it is I got lucky riding on Joan’s coattails a little bit because she really trained this chorus really well. Joan loves to write music that is very challenging, especially rhythmically. And this chorus is just so used to singing her music and got trained really well by her. So part of it is getting lucky with that legacy.

And there’s also, the way that I go about it, I know how much people can do when they are supported by a strong sense of community and a strong sense of internal drive. Like if they’re inspired to, they see what they want to do, they love the music, they feel supported by the people around them. I do make a lot of resources for the singers as well to practice with. I make audio tracks for all the singers on all the parts, so that from the beginning of the term, they can just be listening on their commute every day.

Miller: So they can hear you or somebody singing their part?

Parsons: Yes, so that they don’t have to be able to read music, they can learn it all by ear if they want to. So part of that is just bolstering with a lot of those kinds of resources to try to make it as easy for many people as possible.

But then also, when you have a really strong inspired sense of community, you get so many people that want to join that are at totally different levels. There’s some people who come that don’t know how to read music and haven’t sung in a choir before, and are even struggling with their voice as they’re aging or something like that. And then you also have people who are very experienced, you might even have a degree in music, and they’re still drawn to being in this community because it’s fun and it’s a really beautiful place to be every Thursday night. You get people who can help each other a lot across different skill levels too, which is really big.

But maintaining that sense of inspiration and strong community, people have resources and people to turn to, is a big part of it too.

Miller: Rebecca Parsons and Jae Douglas, thank you so much.

Parsons / Douglas: Thank you.

Miller: Rebecca Parsons is the director of the Aurora Chorus in Portland. It’s an all women, non-audition choir. Jae Douglas has been in the group since 2018. She is a soprano. As I noted, their next concert is going to be this Saturday evening at Portland’s First United Methodist Church.

We are going to go out with another song that they did at a recent concert. It’s Pink Floyd’s “On The Turning Away.”

Aurora Chorus singing “On The Turning Away” [recording]:

Unaware how the ranks have grown

Driven on by a heart of stone

We could find that we’re all alone

In the dream of the proud

On the wings of the night

As the daytime is stirring

Where the speechless unite in a silent accord

Using words, you will find, are strange

Mesmerised as they light the flame

Feel the new wind of change

On the wings of the night

No more turning away

From the weak and the weary

No more turning away

From the coldness inside

Just a world that we all must share

It’s not enough just to stand and stare

Is it only a dream that there’ll be

No more turning away?

[Recording ends]

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