there we sang the shouts of joy

I think they had enough singers to do Harmonium (Wikipedia does say minimum of 90 but maybe 70 is good enough), but unless they wanted to do a scaled down version, they didn’t have enough musicians. And they’re in a fairly small space. For the most part, not every singer sang at once. There were two groups, one group wore black shirts and pants or tuxedos and the others just repurposed their prom or homecoming clothing aside from one of them who had on a much less formal dress. I actually know one of the singers. Ali. Wouldn’t want to give too much away.

Emma Lou Diemer - Three Madrigals, attributed to William Shakespeare
I’ve heard this before.

Susan LaBarr - Hope is a thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson
Treble voice tends to mean sung by girls and/or prepubescent boys.

Elaine Hagenberg - Measure Me, Sky!, Leonora Speyer
They sing this at their graduations.
Melisma. Not as much melisma abuse as Poulenc’s Mass. And nobody abuses melisma like Peter Quint.
I think the reason Jerry Coyne and the rest of the evolution is true crowd rail against melisma so much is because there was this brief period in popular music when melisma was unacceptable and because the old ways are better (Streisand!?!?) melisma is a bad thing.

Rollo Dilworth - United in Purpose, Maya Angelou
A secular gospel song

David Dickau - My Luve’s Like A Red Red Rose, Robert Burns
Yes, he actually spells it lie that. This was back in the 1790s when spelling wasn’t standardized.

Matthew Harris - When Daffodils Begin to Peer, William Shakespeare
This does not sound like I’d expect it to sound. A swinging polyphonic song, but the lyrics are pure Elizabethian hey nonny nonny. It's from The Winter's Tale so I'll get back to you.

Darmon Meader, That Ever I Saw, anonymous
The theme of this set was love songs.

Joan Szymko - Arise, My Love, from the Song of Solomon and Reverend Robert Lowry
A few years ago, I was wondering if anyone set the Song of Solomon (a collection of erotic poetry in the Bible. Most religious figures treat it as allegorical. As to whether Paul Park’s Starbridge Chronicles, in which an alien (that is to say, human) astronaut’s erotic poetry is the basis of their religion is inspired by the existence of the Song of Solomon, probably yes) to music. I found Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Flos Campi which was merely inspired by it.
And, Google, I know what I said. See, this is what Google’s getting worse at finding.
This was for all of the soprano and alto voices.
It was written for a LGBT chorus in Montreal. The text “a band of many colors is riding the sky” was added for this. The other text, At The River, was written after an epidemic in the summer of 1864 and he was contemplating the apocalypse as it was happening.
It’s not part of any larger cycle, but it does exist.

Marques Garrett - Sing Out, My Soul, William Henry Davies
This one, on the other hand, was written for tenor and bass voices.

Williametta Spencer - At The Round Earth’s Imagined Corners, John Donne
The next three all have a theme of death and the beyond.

One of the things the director noticed is that all of the composers are living and all of the poets are dead. Except for maybe Anonymous, the world’s most prolific poet.
Two of the composers are in their nineties but I checked and as of April 28, 2024, they are all alive.

Jake Runestad - Let My Love Be Heard, Alfred Noyes

Crossing the Bar - Gwyneth Walker, Alfred Tennyson
No, “Gywneth” was a typo.

Carl Strommen - Setting Sail, Walt Whitman
The text is from Leaves of Grass. It features not just chorus and accompanying piano but flute and oboe and drum kit. It builds up with drumrolls and a small black flute and fades away and builds again.

Kyle Pederson - I Dream A World, Langston Hughes
A song calling for the freedom and peace of all peoples.
My friend went to that school and when she came to college, she was astonished at how diverse it was, since we had a lot of Cape Verdean, Japanese, and Cameroonian exchange students. Me, I went to school with a ton of Albanians. Probably literally. This one features flute and trumpet and the guy on drums just used the snare.

In Meeting We Are Blessed, R Gatsnahos
The poem by R. Gatsnahos, whoever that is, was inspired by John Donne. I guess it premiered in Nairobi.
They all stood in a square around the room. One of the singers had a shaker and the djembe player sat in the center of the room.

burning question: if antisemitism isn’t wanted in Texas, then why are they trying to bring Tesla there?