A group of young girls in a Northeast Kingdom school are making a lot of joyful noise this season. They belong to a chorus started two decades ago by a woman who brought the tradition of Balkan music to the tiny, remote town of Newark. She died in 2005, but the choir has been revived in her honor by two women who sang for her as little girls.
This month, the new Newark Balkan Chorus is hard at work getting ready for their winter concert.
On a chilly December afternoon, seven young girls sing with gusto after classes end at the Newark Street School. The adults leading them include two sisters, Elly and Erin Barksdale. Now in her thirties, Ellie remembers when she was a seventh grader learning these challenging harmonies and rhythms from the late founder of this Balkan choir, Evanne Weirich.
“Many of us had never sung a song in a different language ... so it seemed so sophisticated and so outside every norm that we had,” Elly Barksdale explains as she hands out black binders with music to students sitting in a circle. “And being in a small town, you know, you grab onto that. If that excites you, you just let it take you. Yeah, it was great,” Barksdale says a little wistfully.
Balkan singing, under Weirich’s direction, did take them far — all the way to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion one year.
"Many of us had never sung a song in a different language. So it seemed so sophisticated and so outside of any norm that we had." - Ellie Barksdale, on the Newark Balkan Chorus she joined two decades ago and recently helped to revive
But at the height of their success, tragedy struck when their beloved leader died at the age of 50 from cancer. What was supposed to be a fundraiser for EvanneWeirich’s health care costs turned out to be a memorial concert, as Erin Barksdale recalls.
“We would have liked it to be what it was supposed to be, but at the same time it was a beautiful way to say goodbye. And Evanne would have loved nothing better,” Barksdale says.
No doubt Weirich would also have loved hearing a new generation of 10 and 11-year-olds revive the musical genre she loved. Mairen Tierney says it’s a learning experience that’s fun.
“And it’s an opportunity you can take to like, I mean, when you’re older you can say, 'Oh yeah, I used to be in a Balkan chorus, we’d sing a different language.' It’s kind of cool, it just—bonks you up a point,” Tierney says as her friends giggle.
The young singers learn melodies and close harmonies by rote. In rehearsal, they don’t look at sheet music very often, except to see lyrics in several different languages, including Bulgarian.
The new Newark Balkan Chorus will perform at various times during the Burklyn Arts Council’s Holiday Market at Lyndon State College on Dec. 13 and 14.
