Community members part of Grammy-winning choral group.
Two members of the St. Joe’s community are part of a choral group that won the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance.
Rebecca Siler, adjunct voice professor, and John Grecia, staff accompanist, are members of The Crossing, a professional chamber choir based in Philadelphia that has been around since 2005. The group won the award for their performance of composer Gavin Bryars’ “The Fifth Century.”
The Crossing began as a group of friends that had sung together in years past and missed singing with each other when their conductor, Donald Nally, moved to Wales and was the choirmaster at the Welsh National Opera. Nally missed working with the group and creating new music, which lead to a reunion of the members performing a concert to see where it would lead them. The performance was well-received, which inspired the members to create an ensemble of all professional singers doing exclusively modern music.
Though “Fifth Century” was their second Grammy nomination, as their piece nominated last year did not win, this year they had five cd’s that were eligible.
Siler, who joined the St. Joe’s community in the fall of 2016, lends her soprano voice talents to The Crossing and was one of its founding members.
“In the preliminary round of voting, there are pieces that are put up for consideration for the Grammys. If you are a Grammy [voting] member, you can go in and choose in every category five albums you think should be in the running and once you get into the first five, you are Grammy nominated,” Siler said.
“The Fifth Century” is a large album-length choral work broken up into smaller parts, or movements. The choral members were pleasantly surprised to hear that they had won, particularly because the piece was recorded in 2014 but was just recently released.
Grecia, who began working at St. Joe’s in 2002, is the group’s rehearsal performance pianist and accompanist. He works with the choir to learn the melodies before the piece reaches its final form, which may be a capella or with some instrumentals. For this performance, the group collaborated with the PRISM Quartet, a group of saxophone players.
For Grecia, this win marked all of the hard work that The Crossing has dedicated, as well as the close bonds the members have formed.
“The piece stands as a verification of the work that we’ve done for the ten years since we were founded,” Grecia said. “For a piece like this to win, and to be written by an internationally renowned composer, Gavin Bryars, is a verification of the purpose of the group, which is to promote choral music, socially conscious choral music.”
Grecia said that the piece is not one of the most well-known in the classical genre, so the title alone would not attract as much attention. However, the piece holds significance for the group, making the award even more meaningful. The performance was dedicated to Jeff Dinsmore, one of the group’s founders and Siler’s partner, who passed away in 2014.
“The fact that the group is still going and has come this far is such a beautiful legacy for him,” Siler said. “And now having a piece that is a Grammy Award winning piece that when people look at it, it says ‘For Jeffrey Dinsmore,’ it’s kind of a beautiful thing.”
Despite the bittersweet situation, Grecia knows Dinsmore would be proud of all the hard work the group has accomplished through this win.
“He’d be smiling pretty grandly right now at this news,” Grecia added.
*Emily Graham contributed to this article
