This year the Eastern Performing Arts Fraternity’s season culminates with Eastern Youth Chorale’s tenth anniversary Thanksgiving service today and tomorrow at the Central Bank Auditorium.
They will perform the African Sanctus, the chorale's third full mass to be performed after Robert Ray's Gospel Mass and Mozart's Requiem.
The chorale's musical director, John Thomas said in a release, he chose this challenging work as he feels “it is an apt representation of what T&T represents, or should represent as the mass features multiculturalism throughout the entire composition.”
He added that the EYC doesn’t specialise in any particular genre, as the three masses chosen are all different by nature, as Robert Ray's mass was influenced by gospel and jazz. The African Sanctus seeks to fuse ethno rhythms and European classical music. “This is what Trini is about,” he says, “Why stay in the box, mix it up a little.”
African Sanctus is a 1972 choral mass and is the best-known work of British composer and ethnomusicologist David Fanshawe. Fanshawe juxtaposed the Latin Mass is juxtaposed with live recordings of traditional African music that the composer recorded between 1969 to 1975 during a journey up the Nile. The work consists of 13 movements and follows the journey of the composer through Africa. The recordings are from Egypt, Sudan, Uganda and Kenya.