In the 1980s, Concordia College was then a Lutheran university in
Edmonton, Canada, part of the larger Concordia University group in
the USA. The choir was about seventy people in size. We used to have
a weekend mini-tour in November and a ten-day major tour in April or
May, along with occasional church concerts and two large
performances a year at First Presbyterian in downtown Edmonton. My
chief memory of choir tours was spending far too much time on the
bus and the ham-and-scalloped-potatoes that every church seemed to
serve us.
HT was a subset of the choir which performed more contemporary music
than a traditional choir could. The name Happy Together was fine in
the 1960s, but it was more than a little cheesy by our time, so it
was usually called HT. They later became Voices in Praise. The
director of HT for 1989-90, Christa Poscente, is now an occasional
recording Christian artist and opera singer. You can hear her here.
I didn’t record the choir in my first year. Our Christmas concert
was at First Presbyterian in December 1988. It was engineered by
Matt Day, and I did some minor remixing later. We made a closed
recording on the May 1989 tour in a church in Issaquah, near
Seattle. It always irritated me that we would put so much work
into those sets, only to have them sold on cheap dollar-store
cassettes. My first recording of the choir was in November 1989
when we were in Stony Plain, Alberta, though it was just two
microphones hanging from the rafters. For the next two major tours
I had my four-track and made much better recordings with Corey
Haberstock as my assistant. It was impossible to make a good
recording at First Presbyterian with their old wiring, and so the
Christmas 1990 concert was lost, though the TV recordings survive.
I also made live recordings of H.T. in the Concordia auditorium in
April 1990, 1991, and 1992, except for the 1991 studio recording
which Andreas Schwabe made and I mixed. Prof. Hafso was a popular
professor and we mourned his passing in 2010, but I like to
remember those days on tour of being billeted by quirky church
members who would talk endlessly about their dogs or barbed-wire
collections. I think about the stupid jokes we made about
everything, usually about the effeminacy of the tenors, and about
the fact that I first joined choir to meet girls (it didn’t work).
In January 2026 I did a new remastering of the multitrack recordings and used a small amount of AI technology to clean up hiss and distortion, as the recordings are gradually migrated to YouTube.
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