Eight-Person "Vox Humana" a cappella Group Performs Extraordinary Concert at St. Paul's April 5

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, April 5) I attended a quite remarkable concert by an eight-person youth vocal group called Vox Humana at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral. The personnel are Lauren Carter and Stephanie Smith, sopranos; Chloe O’Mara and Antonia Fuenzalida, altos; John Yokoyama and Kit Jack Chan, tenors; and Allen Pace and Uriah Brown, basses. They performed a wide variety of material within the eight songs they sang (seven in the printed program and an unannounced encore, Billy Joel’s breakup ballad “And So It Goes,” from his 1989 album Storm Front, though he actually wrote it six years earlier). They opened with an original setting of the traditional religious verse “O Nata Lux” by John Yokoyama, who said he’d been inspired to compose it by singing the earlier setting of the same Latin text by Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-1585) in a church group. The members of Vox Humana met each other, not surprisingly, as church singers, and five of them have been invited to compete in an international competition this summer in Graz, Austria (coincidentally also the birthplace of Arnold Schwarzenegger). Yokoyama thanked his parents and grandparents for allowing Vox Humana to rehearse in their home (and the grandparents were there at the concert). The second song on their program couldn’t have been more different: “Time” by Jennifer Lucy Cook, who’s both a choral composer and a pop star with a band called Cookie. Cook wrote “Time” for the Opus Vocal ensemble for a Louisiana competition sponsored by the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) in 2021-2022. It’s a charming little patter song about the importance we humans put on the concept of time even though it’s essentially meaningless; it reminded me of the song “Seasons of Love” from Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent, but I thought it was better.

Then there was a piece by Kerensa Briggs called “Media Vita,” based on another traditional Latin-language religious text, the one that begins, “In the midst of life we are in death.” (I remember flipping that around during the AIDS epidemic and reworking it as, “In the midst of death we are in life,” as a tribute to the resilience of the Queer community in the face of this literally life-or-death threat.) Afterwards the group split, with the men dong Ola Gjello’s “Ubi Caritas” (“Where charity and love are, God is there”) and the women singing one of the most amazing pieces on the program, a pop song called “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap (b. 1977). Imogen Heap is a British singer-songwriter with a broad range of styles – her Wikipedia page lists her genres as “pop – electropop – experimental pop – art pop – alternative rock,” and her own version of “Hide and Seek” is as experimental as pop ever gets. It’s sung a cappella, with Heap multi-tracking her own voice and singing some of the parts through Vocoders. Vox Humana’s arrangement was excellent and beautifully sung, and they even got some of the electromechanical effect created by Heap’s use of Vocoders on the original. Then the group reunited for an impressive version of the Radiohead ballad “Pyramid Song.” St. Paul’s musical director Martin Green was announced as their accompanist on piano, but “Pyramid Song” was the only piece last night on which he played. The final piece on their printed program was “Salutation,” a beautiful setting by Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds (b. 1977) to a text by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the first non-European recipient of a Nobel Prize (in Literature, in 1913). They closed with Billy Joel’s heart-rending breakup song “And So It Goes,” but at least one audience member called out for a second encore – which they didn’t offer. I was particularly taken by Uriah Brown, an African-American with a strong, powerful, deep-bass voice which I’d love to hear in a tribute to Paul Robeson. But the entire group blended beautifully, and their inclusion of pop and rock material without sacrificing the basic elements of their sound provided a shining example of how so-called “crossover music” should be done.