In 2008, newly graduated from The Hartt School in Connecticut, I made a leap into the unknown—moving off to Minneapolis to join Cantus. Having grown up between Florida and the Northeast and attended choral boarding school in New Jersey, I was no stranger to adventure, but the Midwest felt like uncharted territory. I saw it as an opportunity to grow new roots, building a new network of friends and colleagues far removed from my extended family, who had lived on the East Coast for generations.
As far as I knew, my Grandma and Grandpa, Willabel and Giles, had raised my mother and her three sisters in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, and my move to Minnesota represented a new, separate chapter from that family history. But a few years later, while home for the holidays, a conversation with my grandma about her first job out of school revealed something I never knew: she had been born in Winona, Minnesota, and attended Carleton College in Northfield before moving to New York.
I was thrown! How had I never known that my grandma was born in Minnesota and had gone to school just down the road from where I had made my new home? Apparently, I had made an “unknown” leap right to the place where my roots had been all along.
We’re all connected by this common thread of discovery. Our program, My Ancestors Speak, illuminates a few of these personal threads with pieces that were chosen as a direct result of one or more of our ensembles’ collective ancestries, giving us a deeper connection to the music through the lenses of personal journeys and shared histories. We hope you’ll see a bit of yourself in these stories and songs, and perhaps leave the concert wondering what unexpected threads connect your own life to the people and places that came before you. After all, sometimes the roots we’re searching for aren’t nearly as far away as we imagined.
-Paul John Rudoi, tenor
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