Our Music
Harmony Mountain Singers mines a glittering vein of songs that spans genres, cultures and continents. Our repertoire ranges from Appalachian roots to New Orleans jazz, from spirituals to Motown, country blues to Hollywood musicals, the great American songbook to contemporary Canadian folk. We draw on the compositions of songwriters who are acclaimed, exotic, ‘folk famous’ and/or emerging. The sole rule for inclusion is that a work delights us and our audience.
In our voyage through the ocean of song we have explored Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Shari Ulrich, Bruce Cockburn, Freddie Mercury, Jerry Garcia, Sting and Nat King Cole. Wonderful discoveries lie ahead for all who choose to share our journey.
The Songs Sing Us
The songs lived in our hearts long before we knew they were there. We who grant passage give birth to their voices.
For the songs' sake, we grow into a vessel, a hive mind, an aeolian harp. A frog prince croaking for the metamorphosis of love.
The meridians of the world pour their songs into us: Liverpool, Motown, Nashville, New Orleans, Havana, Johannesburg, Clarksdale, Parchman Farm, Appalachia, Tin Pan Alley, Haight-Ashbury, Horsefly, Portage and Main. The Downtown Eastside. Each song is a world within a world. Each bears a map to be traced and each is unknowable. The stars wheeling through their skies shine beyond reckoning.
The songs demand utter submission. We are apprentices to the trade of colour: crimson of passion, blue of despair, darkness of doubt, silver of joy, green of longing, golden hope.
The songs are a tough audience. They bid us grow into more than we are and ask us to shed our hoarded singularity.
If honoured, they forgive flaws with grace. They breach our solitude. The songs sing us.
Paul Luke, Tenor