Westminster Williamson Voices performs Thomas LaVoy's "Alleluia"

The soprano solo is optional.

Thomas Lavoy's "As I Walked the Silent Earth" was just published in The Evoking Sound Choral Series.Ê This work was the commencement Anthem at the 2013 Westminster graduation ceremony in The Princeton University Chapel.Ê Thomas Lavoy is a graduate of Westminster Choir College and is pursuing a Ph.D, in Composition at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) with acclaimed composer Paul Mealor.Ê Lavoy, recognized for his compositional craft and music of deep and compelling honesty, GIA is proud to be the publisher of not only this work, but a new setting of The Lake Isle of Innisfree (Yeats) (G-8472) for unaccompanied choir.

Watch this video performed by Voce andÊconducted by Mark SingletonÊon March 3rd, 2019 as a part of Light Eternal: The Music of Thomas LaVoy.

In 2013 I had the great honor of receiving a major commission from the Marquette Symphony Orchestra to compose a 45-minute work dedicated to the victims of the Italian Hall disaster. On Christmas Eve of 1913 inCalumet, Michigan, a man shouted "Fire!" in the crowded Italian Hall, causing a stampede that would leave 73 innocent people, the vast majority of them young children, dead on the stairs leading down to the street below.The man who cried "Fire!" was never positively identified or made to pay for his crime, and even today his dark celebrity is often more prevalent in discussions about the disaster than the identity of the victims themselves.A Child's Requiem, with a libretto written by my mother, poet Esther Margaret Ayers, seeks to posthumously elevate the dead out of the context of the Italian Hall disaster; to celebrate them as they were in life and deathand not as a statistic used to apportion blame. "Lux aeterna" is the flagship movement of the work, a supplication to God

O Great Beyond was commissioned by JAM (the John Armitage Memorial) and first performed by the BBC Singers and Nicholas Cleobury on July 8th, 2016, as part of the JAM on the Marsh festival. The text is taken from The Gardener, a collection of verse by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Published one year after Tagore's Nobel Prize-winning collection of spiritual poems, Gitanjali (1912), The Gardener contains poems that were written much earlier in his career. Tagore retrospectively described this collection as the "lyrics of love and life." The musical narrative of O Great Beyond is meant to mirror the stages of love portrayed in The Gardener, culminating in the desire for a "Beautiful End" in the final movement.-Thomas LaVoyÊ

A favorite track from the University of Aberdeen Chamber Choir recording of the same name, The Immortal Memory is a beautiful setting of Whittier's vivid poem. The piano accompaniment offers lovely, driving support, and the optional fiddle adds to the imagery of the Scottish landscape found in the poem. Jo-Michael Scheibe Choral Series.Downloadable Fiddle Part

I have recently been incredibly inspired by the writings of the great Bengali mystic Rabindranath Tagore, whose monumental collection of poetry Gitanjali won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. This book introduces the reader to a new awareness of the world that surrounds us, deepening the connection between nature and the human spirit that we all yearn for. Verse 69 is particularly joyful and life-affirming: an ecstatic realization of the energies that move in ceaseless ebb and flow through us, our lives, and our natural environment. Each individual line of this verse has a unique character and color, so I have placed each in a key that I feel suits the mood of the text. The constantly flowing ostinati that weave their way throughout are collectively a musical representation of the "stream of life" to which Tagore refers. This flowing line can be found even in the subdued third line of text, which makes reference to the "ocean-cradle of birth and of death." In similar fashion, the

This unaccompanied choral work for mixed voices draws the audience into a world of deep emotion, rich harmony and vivid imagery. Drawing upon the subconscious bond between mother and child, the work explores the child's fears and the mother's attempt to soothe those fears. Duration: ca. 6:10.