The Southern Tier Singers' Collective will present "Forging the Path" on June 13 at St. Patrick’s Church in Binghamton, featuring a program that combines established choral masterworks with contemporary voices and a winning composition by a young local composer.
Speaking on WSKG’s Arts in Depth, Music Director William Culverhouse described the concert as “a panorama of pieces that we consider both groundbreaking and inspiring.”
“The title, "Forging the Path", is a reference to the fact that the concert features the winner of our composition competition for young New York composers,” Culverhouse said. “But it also features other pieces that are kind of groundbreaking in a variety of ways.”
The program includes motets by Anton Bruckner, Benjamin Britten’s "Hymn to St. Cecilia" on texts by W. H. Auden, Morton Lauridsen’s "Sonnet of the Night", works by composer Dale Trumbore, and spirituals arranged by Moses Hogan.
Culverhouse said the acoustics of St. Patrick’s Church make it an ideal setting for the repertoire.
“A lot of those pieces involve extremes of contrast in either range or dynamics or some aspect of their compositional process that makes them particularly well suited for us to sing in Saint Patrick’s Church with its beautiful reverberant acoustics,” he said.
The concert also continues the ensemble’s support of contemporary composers through its composition competition for young New York musicians. Culverhouse explained that the competition is open to composers either living or studying full-time in New York State, with submissions judged anonymously by a blind panel.
“We were delighted and surprised to find that after we had selected the winning work for this year’s competition, it happens to be written by a local high school student at Vestal High School, Nicholas Catarella,” Culverhouse said.
For Catarella, the news came as a complete surprise.
“This was my first choral composition I had ever written,” he said. “I’ve only been composing since late 2024, so less than a year into my composition journey, I wrote this.”
Catarella said he had been revising the piece with his choir teacher, Austin Kiley, assuming it would eventually be performed only by his school choir.
“About 15 minutes after our last editing session, I checked my email and saw an email from the Southern Tier Singers' Collective,” he recalled. “It said, ‘Congratulations, you won.’ Immediately I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ I went sprinting down to another music teacher’s classroom saying, ‘I won! I can’t believe it.’”
Because the work was written for a cappella choir, Catarella said the compositional process was challenging.
“I really didn’t know how to start it,” he said. “I could kind of hear little ideas in my mind of where I could bring it, but I used another choral song, Empire of Blue by Rob Dietz, almost as a map to guide my composition.”
Unable to find a public-domain text he liked, Catarella ultimately wrote his own lyrics.
“I don’t really consider myself much of a poet,” he said, “but I thought, ‘I’ll just write this and see where it goes.’ It’s actually the only choral composition where I wrote my own lyrics.”
The Southern Tier Singers Collective will present "Forging the Path" on Friday, June 13 at 7:30 p.m. at St. Patrick's Church on Leroy Street in Binghamton. More information is available at Southern Tier Singers Collective.