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SMC Choirs Team Up with Portage Northern
Published on October 27, 2025 - 1 p.m.
Southwestern Michigan College’s fall choir concert, “Songs of the Soul,” featured a collaboration with Portage Northern High School for the 50th anniversary of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
“It’s wonderful to have Chelsea Whiteoak conducting us on this piece by one of my favorite artists, Gordon Lightfoot,” said SMC Director of Choral Activities David Carew. “Chelsea is a Dowagiac high school graduate. I recruited her at the McDonald’s drive-through to come to SMC. This is her fifth year at Portage Northern.”
SMC, directed by Carew, opened the Oct. 24 program with a selection by German composer Felix Mendelssohn performed by Chorllennium.
SMC’s Choral Scholars performed two pieces in Latin, including a motet where multiple independent melodic lines are sung simultaneously.
Texts come from the monks of ancient Gaul, the region of Western Europe that is modern-day France.
A vocal solo featured sophomore Lauren Lovell of Watervliet.
The women from Chorllennium and SMC Collegiate Choir combined to present “Psalm 100” by Rene Clausen, longtime music professor and conductor of The Concordia Choir of Moorhead, Minn., accompanied by Christine Seitz on keyboard.
Carew next spotlighted an arrangement of “Swing Low” by Curtis Gulledge Sr., “our clinician last summer and a good friend and colleague and alumnus of Western (Michigan University). He changed many lives with his contagious joy and approach to making music and finding your own voice. An infectious bass line runs through it. Portage Northern learned it today, so I’m really proud of the work they did. Then we’ll jump into the Chichester songs.”
“Songs of the Soul” also featured Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.
Three movements convey a meaning of conflict and resolution, ultimately advocating for peace and unity through the blending of Jewish and Christian musical traditions.
The work is structured around excerpts from the biblical Psalms, with the first movement depicting joyful worship, the second a dramatic clash between the faithful and the faithless and the third a return to humility and quiet joy, ending with a unified prayer for peace.
Saturday night SMC traveled to Kalamazoo to repeat the performance with the Huskies at First Congregational Church.
