Choral music lovers have a rare opportunity to hear Homing, J.A.C. Redford’s newest oratorio. Under the direction of Dr. Larry Wyatt, Colla Voce, a community chamber choir of professional musicians, presents a concert of Redford’s work on Sunday, July 30 at 4:00 p.m. at the Anglican Church of the Epiphany 2512 N. Beltline Boulevard in Columbia. Tickets are $15 at the door and $10 in advance. Advance tickets may be purchased by calling 803-777-5369.

Millions of people worldwide have heard J.A.C. Redford’s music, most without knowing anything about him as a composer, orchestrator, arranger and conductor. He composed the movie scores for The Trip to Bountiful, Newsies, The Mighty Ducks II and III, Avatar, WALL-E, Bridge of Spies, Finding Dory and Skyfall. His television scores, written for five hundred television episodes, include multiple seasons of Coach and St. Elsewhere, for which he was twice nominated for Emmy Awards.

Of special interest to choral music enthusiasts is Redford’s love for and commitment to composing music for voices. “The human voice is a powerful, vulnerable, perilous, sensitive, maddening, and heartbreaking instrument, a heaven-bound exhalation of the first breath with which God inspired man,” said Redford. He sees his work as a medium for communication rather than just a mode of self-expression. “I seek to write music that appeals to the whole of a person – heart and mind, body and spirit.”

Redford conceived the text for Homing, a four-movement work, as responsive poetry to several literary passages he loves – passages that imagine the experience of transition from this life to the next, or that renders more porous the borders between the material world and the world of spirit. The text in Homing speaks of what C. S. Lewis called our “inconsolable secret, that profound human longing for a place where we belong.”

“As if I were conversing over dinner with the authors whose contributions to the discussion are embodied in their works…Art can be both inspiring and generative, allowing us to communicate across and beyond ordinary boundaries of time and space,” Redford writes. “With this poem, I wanted to actually create a visceral sense of joy and motion with the words.”

Also on the Sunday program, Matthew Ganong, Columbia pianist and composer, performs several of his own piano compositions, including Fantasy, Chorale and Fugue for viola and piano with Alvoy Bryan, assistant professor of music at Allen University, on viola. Ganong studied with John Williams at the University of South Carolina and is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory. He has performed as a collaborative pianist throughout the U.S. Mezzo-soprano Ginger Jones-Robinson, instructor of music at Allen University, Columbia, performs three songs on poems by Mary Oliver.

Redford has produced three CDs devoted to choral music and a number of outstanding choral ensembles have premiered or performed his music such as the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain and Choir of King’s College Cambridge. John Dickson, professor of choral music at the Louisiana State University School of Music said, “JAC has a way of penetrating the soul of the singer.”

Richard Nance, director of choral activities at Pacific Lutheran University, says, “JAC’s greatest gift is his connection of music and text… He understands the emotional connection text can bring to music.”