The Bossa Nova Chorale and the Mako Band will perform a variety of songs that blend Christmas, Hanukkah and other winter holidays to share a message of peace. The annual Peace Concert will take place inside the Don Taft University Center’s Performance Theatre at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 22. Tickets are free, but students are encouraged to arrive around 6:30 – 6:45 p.m., as there is limited seating available.
The song list includes a large variety of Christmas and Hanukkah songs and hymns. From Hanerot Halalu, which is a traditional hymn to sing after the Hanukkah lights are kindled, to Hallelujah.
The Peace Concert tradition was started by Bill Adams, Bossa Nova Chorale director and professor in the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts, in 2008 when he noticed a need for a holiday concert.
“The Peace Concert is really just the holiday concert, except that we had called it the Peace Concert because we would like for it to be an open and welcoming event for people of any religious denomination or non-religious denomination, and we focus it broadly on peace in the world,” Adams said. “Peace is not something which is ephemeral. Peace is where we are in the moment, in the room with us making music and the people sitting there listening to it.”
Adams said that the Peace Concert is something that could only happen in South Florida.
“If we were in other parts of the country, we might call [the Peace Concert] a Christmas concert, but because we live in a beautifully diverse community, and we have an incredibly diverse student body at Nova, we wanted to be open and welcoming to all people,” Adams said.
Carlo Ricchi, Mako Band director, hopes that this concert will be a good break for students before final exams begin.
“This is one of the great things about Nova — that we strategize this date and this concert so that it’s before the final exams. And it gives some of the students that are around a chance to distract themselves for an hour, take them back to when they were kids and were listening to some of these songs with their families back home, just so that they can decompress, maybe travel to a different headspace before they go back and dive into the books,” Ricchi said.
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