A Tapestry of Voices

Exploring community through identity, words and music as the Westminster Choir tours the eastern United States.

Westminster Choir College and its community have been likened to a tapestry - a fabric with a rich texture and design.

Our tapestry is woven from individual threads that are permanently connected to one another, telling a story that is far greater than the sum of its individual strands. Every individual touched by Westminster – through the work of our students and our alumni, through our performances – becomes a part of the Westminster tapestry.

The Tapestry of Voices project seeks to represent the threads added to Westminster’s fabric through the Westminster Choir’s 2016 tour performances. Titled “Angel Band,” the tour concert program was based on a theme of shared experience and community, and the belief that each performance creates a new community – composed of the choir and the audience. For those few hours everyone shares an experience, a connection, a moment in time. We may enter the concert hall as strangers, and we may never see each other again, but for those few hours we have created a community and added new threads to the Westminster tapestry.

The Project

Before each performance, members of the audience were invited to reflect on their lives at that point in time and to select one word that best represents them as they join the concert community. After writing their word on a piece of paper they were photographed. Following each concert, the photographs were collected, printed, and placed in a communal vessel during key moments in the succeeding concerts, representing the community created by the audience and choir at each tour concert.

When the choir returned to Princeton, all of the photographs were used to create an art installation that appeared with the choir on the stage at its Homecoming Concert in Princeton University's Richardson Auditorium. The photographs also became the centerpiece of a video that weaves together those images and a recording of some of the music performed in the tour concerts. It represents the many people and communities connected through Westminster – the choir and the college - a Tapestry of Voices.