In the 1980s, Concordia College was then a Lutheran university in Edmonton, Canada, part of the larger Concordia University group in the USA. The choir was about seventy people in size. We used to have a weekend mini-tour in November and a ten-day major tour in April or May, along with occasional church concerts and two large performances a year at First Presbyterian in downtown Edmonton. My chief memory of choir tours was spending far too much time on the bus and the ham-and-scalloped-potatoes that every church seemed to serve us.
HT was a subset of
the choir which performed more contemporary music than a traditional choir could. The name Happy Together was fine in the 1960s, but it was more
than a little cheesy by our time, so it was usually called HT. They
later became Voices in Praise. The director of HT for 1989-90, Christa Poscente, is now an occasional recording Christian artist. She has a web link here.
I didn’t record the choir my first year. Our Christmas concert was at First Presbyterian in December 1988. It was recorded by Matt Day, and I did some remixing later. We made a closed recording on the May 1989 tour in a church in Issaquah, near Seattle. It always irritated me that we would put so much work into those sets, only to have them sold on cheap dollar-store cassettes. My first recording of the choir was in November 1989 when we were in Stony Plain, Alberta, and it was just two microphones hanging from the rafters. For the next two major tours I had my four-track and made better recordings with Corey Haberstock as my assistant. It was impossible to make a good recording at First Presbyterian with their old wiring, and so the Christmas 1990 concert was lost, though the TV recordings survive.
I also made live recordings of H.T. in the Concordia auditorium in April 1990, 1991, and 1992, except for the 1991 studio recording which Andreas Schwabe made and I mixed. Prof. Hafso was a popular professor and we mourned his passing in 2010, but I like to remember those days on tour of being billeted by quirky church members who would talk endlessly about their dogs or barbed-wire collections. I think about the stupid jokes we made about everything, usually about the effeminacy of the tenors, and about the fact that I first joined choir to meet girls (it didn’t work). |
