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Music tour '08 a success
By Kristyn Johnson
J-Lab Staff Writer
Eighty-seven student musicians participated in the recent six-day music tour, leaving March 5 and returning March 10. The group traveled from church to church, singing for an array of audiences throughout Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
“This tour seemed to be the smoothest one I have been on,” said Sarah Shuholm, who has been on three tours. “Everything fell together perfectly, and we rarely ran into any problems the whole tour.”
There were, however, many moments when exhaustion took over, and some of the members wanted to just stop singing.
“The thing was that I wasn’t there for myself; I was doing it for God,” Janet Galambush said. “Knowing we were doing it for the people we were singing to and that we were touching their hearts; that was the thing that kept me going.”
Dr. Virginia Cross, music department chair, agreed that inspiring audiences was one of the tour’s top goals.
“The value of touring for our students is to polish their performance skills,” Cross said. “It is to also share some of the music they have been studying this year with new audiences; to use their musical talents, personal conversation and prayer with audience members to encourage the members of our audiences in their spiritual walk; and to enjoy the fellowship and grow in our sense of teamwork as we travel and perform together.”
Although the tour was strenuous, it provided humorous moments too.
Musician Jessica Pruitt’s favorite comical moment occurred at a Sunday evening performance in White Salmon, Wash.
“One of the violinists was giving us a note to get us started on ‘The Heavens are Telling,’” she recalled. “As soon as they were done with the second note, we suddenly heard this really loud ‘Whoosh!’ Someone in the congregation yelled out, ‘The rapture's come!’ We all laughed when we found out it was the air conditioning.”
Another memorable moment came when Professor John Bartsch hammed it up after a student asked him if he ever “head-bangs” while listening to rock music.
“He took a drink of water, stood up so everybody could see, and then started banging his head around. We laughed until we cried. It was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen,” Pruitt said.
While the tour provided many memorable funny stories, there were also moments when God was clearly at work.
One occurred on the tour’s last night, when the musicians didn’t have a place to sleep.
“The church where we went to perform that night offered for us to stay there, and we had some great conversations with the people,” Shuholm said. “It was a definite God-thing, and, even though it was on a whim, we felt God’s hands around us.”
While being filled with laughs and lasting memories, the tour was also characterized by a sense of unity, Shuholm noted.
“In years past the tour members have either called it the ‘music’ tour or the ‘band’ tour,” she explained. “But this tour, it was considered the whole music department tour.
