By Diane Urbani de la Paz
PORT ANGELES — This being the Season of Creation, two Port Angeles residents are planning a get-together on Saturday evening.
“Viriditas: A Celebration of Hildegard von Bingen” blends original music by local composer Noah Michael Smith, poetry by Don Corson and the “sound of greening” gleaned from living plants.
The performance is free at 7 p.m. Saturday at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, 301 E. Lopez Ave., and the public is invited, said Corson, who’s wanted to have this celebration for a long time now.
He and Smith are enchanted by Hildegard, a German Benedictine abbess, writer, philosopher, composer and mystic who lived during the High Middle Ages. Smith and Corson are also reveling in the Season of Creation, an international event marking autumn and celebrating human connection to all of life on Earth.
Corson, 74, is winemaker at the 30-year-old Camaraderie Cellars in Port Angeles. Smith, 30, is a queer artist and performer who conducts the peninsula queer xhoir. They moved to Port Angeles from New Haven, Conn., a year and a half ago when they were selected as Holy Trinity Lutheran Church’s director for music ministry.
They might be seen as an unusual pairing, Corson said. Their interest in Hildegard, however, and a love of music and life made this weekend’s performance possible.
The whole process leading up to Saturday evening has been “joy-giving,” Smith said.
“Noah has claimed (their) chops on this,” Corson added.
Collaborating with them are a vocal ensemble called Hildegard’s Own Singers: sopranos MarySue French, Elizabeth Christian, Kelly Sanderbeck, Sally Adams, Judy Moilanen, Valerie Lape and Mallory Jacobs, and altos Margaret Ruud, Lucy Norwell, Vicki Helwick, Vicki Corson and Bonnie Christianson.
Pianist Mark Johnson and hand bell ringers Sunny Chornomaz and Julianna Getzin also will appear. Joy Lingerfelt, the retired musical director at Holy Trinity and the director of the Northwest Women’s Chorale, gave steadfast support to the whole effort, Smith said.
Plants, like those proliferating around Camaraderie Cellars, also have a role to play.
“I attached electrodes [to green leaves] and got biodata,” Smith said. This was mixed into the rest of the music in the composition to be heard Saturday.
The hour-long performance will have an evening vespers-like feeling, Corson said. It’s all about marking autumnal birth, just three days before the fall equinox. This date is also Hildegard’s saint’s day, both the day she was born in 1098 and the day she died in 1178.
Corson hopes Hildegard would find the evening’s music and poetry pleasing. They celebrate “all the things she loved, cared for and shared,” he writes in the program.
“I’m an old white guy,” Corson said. Yet he wishes for “an intergenerational collaboration that is peacemaking, loving, and taking each other’s gifts, if I have any, to make something that becomes more than what I or Noah could have thought of by ourselves.”
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Diane Urbani de la Paz is a freelance writer and photographer living in Port Townsend.
