The SIU Choral Union rehearses for the SIU School of Music’s “Peace I Leave With You: Music of Faith and Solidarity” performance, which is on Nov. 18. (Photo by Bhanu Prakash Reddy Badhireddy)
November 13, 2025
SIU’s Concert Choir, Choral Union bring ‘peace’ to Shryock on Nov. 18
CARBONDALE, Ill. — Southern Illinois University Carbondale School of Music students, faculty and community members will gather Tuesday, Nov. 18, to share a message of peace in a free concert in Shryock Auditorium.
“Peace I Leave With You: Music of Faith and Solidarity” will feature the combined talents of SIU’s Concert Choir and Choral Union at 7 p.m. The concert choir is a select group of 25 students, and the 65-member choral union comprises students and community members.
“Singing in a choir may be one of the last true spaces where people of all faiths, political views and perspectives come together to create something beautiful,” said Emerson Eads, assistant professor and director of choral studies. “It asks us to set aside our assumptions about those who see the world differently and to find common ground in a shared act of creation. The unified voices that I witness in this community choir inspired the program’s theme — a hope that the peace we experience through music might ripple outward into the wider world.”
Soloists also featured
The concert will also feature SIU soloists — Carissa Scroggins, an assistant professor of practice in voice, opera director and voice area coordinator; Imogen Prudent-Perry, mezzo-soprano and senior voice major; Sam Deiters, tenor and senior in biological sciences, and Carlyn Zimmermann, an SIU School of Music alumna and Carterville High School choral director. In addition, Jiyeon Lee, assistant professor of practice in piano; Christopher Butler, assistant professor of percussion and music technology; Richard Kelley, associate professor of saxophone and director of jazz studies, and Anita Hutton, an accomplished local organist and pianist, will also perform.
Program features wide range of music
The program’s featured work is the Southern Illinois premiere of “Mass for Choir, Soloists, Organ, Piano, Soprano, Saxophone and Side Drum” by James Buonemani, director of music and organist at St. James-in-the-City Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, Eads said.
“What first drew me to this piece was its remarkable tonal language — one that bridges the ancient and the modern,” Eads said. “Buonemani weaves the timeless chant tradition into lush harmonic textures that recall the French masters Fauré and Duruflé, all while pulsing with the rhythmic vitality of our modern age. The result is a sound world that feels both sacred and cinematic.”
Eads added that the organ and piano together “create a shimmering sonic backdrop — at times like a film score — against which the choir becomes the collective voice of believers, past and present, proclaiming the words of this ancient liturgy. The saxophone, an unexpected yet inspired presence in sacred music, emerges as a kind of guardian spirit or celebrant — sometimes floating just above the texture, sometimes interwoven within it.”
The concert will open with Amy Beach’s “Peace I Leave With You” and conclude with “We Shall Walk Through the Valley in Peace,” by Undine Smith Moore, which “is a moving arrangement of the African American spiritual,” Eads said.
“Hearing nearly 100 voices join together in these two a cappella works makes it unmistakably clear: Choir can be a living metaphor for the harmony and understanding our world so deeply yearns for,” he said.