
Over the past two years Prince Albert Choir director Lauren Lonheis saw one choir become three as part of a new like-minded musical collaboration.
Lonheis brought together the Big Noise Youth Choir along with the all-female Resonate Choir and the all-male Reverb Choir to great acclaim.
Big Noise Youth Choir was formed two years ago after the closing of the Broadway North Youth production of Beauty and the Beast. Lonheis said she wanted to form a choral group from the talent.
“Obviously, everybody that does Broadway North is there by choice because they love to perform,” she said. “A lot of them take private voice lessons and stuff, so we created Big Noise Youth Choir.”
In 2023, Big Noise Youth Choir won top spot at the Saskatchewan Music Festival Association’s provincial finals. That had never happened to Lonheis in her teaching career. After the provincial win, she started to think about what was next.
“People were asking me after ‘what now? After you won provincials, where do you go?’ I said, ‘I think that’s just it. We won our class and then it’s done,’ and a couple months later I got an e-mail saying ‘congratulations Big Noise Youth Choir is one of the four choirs chosen from Saskatchewan to represent the province at Canada West Performing Arts Festival.’ I didn’t even know that was an option, so that was exciting. We sent our recordings on to the Canada West Festival and got our adjudication and certificate from that.”
The next choir to be born was inspired by Lonheis’ first nine years of teaching at the Rivier Academy, which was historically a girl’s school that closed in 2017.
“I had all this choral music that was SSAA which stands for soprano, soprano, Alto, Alto,” she explained. “(It was) women’s choir music that I had done with my students at Rivier, but I had not been able to do it for a while.”
All of this music created for women was not being used, so Lonheis came up with an idea to pull the women from Big Nois Youth Choir and make a women’s choir that could perform these songs Lonehis hadn’t touched for a long time. They were just songs she loved, but had no choir to perform them with.
“We decided to do a women’s choir and then that started expanding,” she said. “I went, well, I was in Mamma Mia, Rock of Ages, (and) Rocky Horror Show, but there are adult women who are in Broadway North that would probably love to do this, so I asked them to come in and create this choir.”
The end result was Resonate, an all-female choir. Lohneis said it was great to have so many like-minded people together.
Cohen Cantin is a current Resonate singer. She said experience has been great.
“It’s really fun putting together the youth company and the adult company,” she said. “I’ve made so many more friends from it.”
Zoe Mortimer is a former Resonate singer who had to quit last year due to scheduling conflicts. Like Cantin, Mortimer said singing in Resonate was a great experience.
“It’s very fun because it’s just women of all ages, so it really just brings everyone together,” she said. “It’s really sweet to see everyone just singing.”
After the women’s choir was created, the men in Big Noise expressed a similar interest in a men’s choir. In response, Lonheis quickly formed the Reverb men’s choir.
“My one choir turned into two and then we needed a name,” she explained. “We decided to stay in the same vein and went with Reverb, (which) sounds like a lower sound to me. We did Resonate and Reverb and Big Noise Youth Choir at last year’s music festival, so that was three different choirs.”
Lonheis said singers in the Big Noise Youth Choir enjoyed the experience, and that snowballed into the creation of two more choirs. All three were recommended to provincial competitions.
“It was just really fun, and a really fun way to build that community within,” Lonheis said.
It was a group of people who had worked together. The adults in Reverb and teenage boys in Reverb all know each other because they had all done shows together. As well, some of them know each other through musical theatre some did not know until the choirs.
“It’s just another way to bridge that community of musical theater people,” she said. “If there are people in Broadway North Youth company and there are people in Broadway North Theater Company, of course there’s going to be crossover people that know each other, but I was surprised how many people didn’t know each other through the two companies, right? So, the choir brought them together.”
Lonheis teaches some of the students in the choir privately and at voice lessons. That led to the idea to combine all three into one choir called Crescendo, but Lonheis said they’ve put that on hold.
“I think doing four choirs was maybe a little bit much for this year, so I think the plan for this year is going to be actually to scale it back,” she said. “We’ll keep Resonate because a lot of those women don’t have anywhere else that they’re singing.”
The plan for the Prince Albert Music Festival this year is to combine the Big Noise Youth Choir, anyone from Resonate who wants to join and the members of Reverb to create one choir.
“I also don’t want to put so many choirs in Festival,” she said. “There are also a lot of really strong school choirs, community choirs. I don’t need to have four. We were having fun, but I think we’re going to just make one big one this year called Big Noise Broadway North.”
This year the festival will feature that choir plus Resonate. As the director, Lonheis said it’s great to see the passion choir members have.
“It’s awesome. There’s also an existing rapport between the singers because of the fact that they have done full scale musicals together. They’ve gone through audition processes together. They’ve gone through weeks and weeks of rehearsals together. They’ve gone through production tech weeks they’ve done,” she said.
“Then when I get them together for a choir, they have already sung together many times and so putting together the repertoire for festival kind of comes naturally.”
The members are in school music programs, taking private lessons and in both versions of Broadway North.
“They are artistic people,” Lonheis said. “We’re just having fun and keeping it fluid. We’ll see what happens from year to year, but it’s giving us an opportunity to sing some really high quality choral literature in a setting that is really natural and comfortable and fun, so Big Noise and Resonate, this year this is the plan.”