Student vocal event in its 64th year at Luther College
A trio of Mountain Lake Public High School (MLHS) Senior Choir vocalists recently participated in the 64th-annual Dorian Vocal Festival, held on the campus of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. The three juniors – Jenny Wright, Ben Grev and Caleb Rempel – were chaperoned by the school’s vocal director, Andrea Brinkman.
The event, which ran from Saturday, January 11 through Monday, January 13, is the largest of its kind in the United States. For the festival, regional choir directors bring select students form all over the Midwest to participate in a mass choir, made up of between 1,200 to 1,400 students in any given year.
According to Brinkman, and the Luther College web site, the Dorian Festivals began in 1949 when Professor Weston Noble invited directors from just over 20 schools in the region to each bring a few selected band students to the Luther campus for a two-day honor band band festival. The event was called the Dorian Band Festival. A vocal festival was added in 1950, and the family of Dorian Festivals and Camps has been growing in scope and participation ever since. Well over 90,000 students have shared in a Dorian musical experience since the festivals began.
Adds Brinkman, “Why the name ‘Dorian?’ The ancient Greeks build their music around a series of modes, or scales – one of which was the Dorian mode. The students who formed the Dorian Singing Society at Luther College took the name of this scale as the name of their organization when they started the ensemble, shortly after the college was founded in 1861.'”
The students attending spent time in rehearsal with their peers – and then performed in a mass choir.
