Arts Alive San Antonio

by JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor

Jennifer Seighman remembers always being around choirs and choral music in school or in church throughout her growing up years.

“So, I kept going at it since elementary school,” she said recently during an interview. “I think there’s something unique about your voice, and the singing becomes exceptionally powerful when many voices join together to create a sound that cannot be replicated in any other way. I have always felt inspired by choral music.”

Today, she and the choir she directs, the San Antonio Choral Society, inspire a lot of listeners in our city.
After earning a bachelor of music education degree from Westminster Choir College, Seighman studied voice and organ, and sang with famous orchestras, such as the New York Philharmonic, the NJ Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra. She eventually earned a doctorate in musical arts in sacred choral music from the Catholic University of America.

She moved to San Antonio when her husband, Garry Seighman, became the director of Choral Activities at Trinity University. “We enjoy San Antonio. It feels like a small town but it’s a big city. We are always running into people we know; everything seems easier here,” including the formation of a 100-member community choir that presents four to five major concerts each season at the St. John’s Lutheran Church downtown. Seighman is also the music director for the church.

The upcoming concert, titled “Echoes in Time,” will focus on sacred music, featuring the works of Francis Poulenc, Toby Young, Lukas Foss, Guillaume Bouzignac, William Byrd, and other composers from past and present, covering a period of several centuries. This carefully put-together program will also be the program, the singers will perform in Europe during their upcoming tour of historic venues in France and England.

“Our group is open to diversity of music, membership and collaborations,” noted the director. Examples include collaborative projects with Symphonie Viva, The Youth Orchestra of San Antonio, the Children’s Chorus of San Antonio, Rover City Ringers, the South Texas Symphonic Orchestra, and other music organizations. They also perform for specific occasions such as Luminaria, New Year’s Eve Celebration at Sea World, the Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Ecumenical Service and others. All choir members are unpaid volunteers.

“We even collaborated with a mariachi band as a choir which is a completely different experience than singing as a soloist.” she said with a laugh. “I feel that we are not limited in what we can do and where we can go to serve music lovers. We also have an annual “Messiah” sing-along and we are bringing it back, post-COVID. We really look to engage with as many different demographics as possible. We nurture diversity. We’ve done Moslem music, Chinese music… Most recently we did a collaboration with the Holocaust Museum for Holocaust Memorial Day. We did a cantata with solo cello and piano. That cantata was actually performed by a subgroup of the most experienced singers, called Sonoro Choir.”

And soon, they will all introduce themselves to listeners in England and France.

On that trip, the San Antonio Choral Society will be joined by the Trinity University Chamber Singers. The two choirs will sing separately but will join forces for the Faure Requiem, explained Seighman.

So, how has this tour come about?

“We (she and her husband) had a long drive at the end of Christmas break from Colorado, and we started talking about having a choir tour again. That was in January of 2023. To make it happen, we worked with a tour company that we have used several times before. We told them that we wanted to do all these different things and they had to figure out how to make it happen. This company is called Classical Movements, out of Fairfax, Virginia. They can make arrangements for our concerts, travel, everything.”

She looks for the itinerary in her purse, to give me the information.  The choir will sing in two churches in England – the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford and St. James in London, plus have a workshop with Bob Chilcott in London. In Paris, they will present two concerts, one at Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, and at La Madeleine in Paris, all historical houses of worship. The musicians will also visit Versailles and the city of Tours.

So, what is she most looking forward to on this trip?

“The thing that’s most exciting for me as a musician, is to sing music by these composers in places where they actually lived, walking in their footsteps. It’s a unique experience. Yes, you can sing their pieces here, but it means so much more, I think, when you understand the context of their lives. The architecture of their spaces, and the food, of course, especially in France.

Will the trip influence her programming choices for the next season? We wondered.

“I’ll probably do different things next year because I like variety for my singers. I’ll probably stay away from French composers for a bit, because we’ve done a lot of French composers recently in preparation for this tour. Some people have never been outside of this country, so this is a special opportunity for our singers. Just seeing all that history in Europe! But let me say something – we added the Hymn from the California Missions to our program because I feel that the missions are such a hallmark of San Antonio. That hymn is the closest that we have to what music would have sounded like in the missions. So, we will start our concerts with that, to give European audiences some San Antonio flavor.

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“Echoes in Time,” June 2 at 3 p.m., at St. John’s Lutheran Church, 502 E. Nueva St., across from La Villita; tickets are $5-$18 available at the door and online www.sanantoniochoralsociety.org