Making a Soulful Noise

Under Chorale Director, Singers Connect With Something Bigger

Bowie Senior Chorale director Craig Sparks leads the group in carols at the members' Christmas party. (By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)

It's half an hour before the Bowie Senior Chorale is set to perform, and the rehearsal room is hushed as director Craig Leland Sparks is calling for something from his singers. It's not a note he's after. It's a feeling, a spirit to match the season.

He waves his conductor's wand, and the slow, familiar sounds of the Scottish ballad "Auld Lang Syne" softly waft from the piano through the room at the back of the Bowie Senior Center.

Sparks's eyes grow lidded, and his arms sweep the air in time to the music.

"Which friend are you thinking about tonight?" Sparks, an old soul at 27, asks the room full of seniors, as he sways back and forth. "And tomorrow, who are you going to call?" He stirs them to reach for thoughts of love and loss, to pour that into each measure of their song.

We'll take a cup o' kindness yet

For auld lang syne.

Some in the group close their eyes as they draw out their notes, and the song is full of memory and yearning.

Later, as the 71-member chorus performs to a standing-room-only crowd, Sparks continues to marry his energy to the songs. He's slow and rhythmic on the Curtis Mayfield standard "People Get Ready." He hunches his back and waves his baton powerfully for the Christmas classic "Carol of the Bells," dramatically tossing his shoulder-length hair back with each crescendo. And when the seniors sing Jackie Wilson's "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher," he beams and lifts his hand ecstatically toward heaven, moving his chorus and the audience alike.

Inside this place, the frantic holiday duties of shopping and cooking and wrapping and rushing fall away. There is only the lifted voice, a full-throated celebration. For Sparks, Christmas is music. It is his way of connecting people to their creativity, to one another and, most especially, he says, to "the light of the world."

And these seniors sure seem lit up.

"Craig kind of reenergized everything," says Ted Tuck, 66, a retired federal agent from Bowie, one of the chorale founders who's sung with various groups for more than 30 years. Sparks worked with his singers for weeks to make "Auld Lang Syne" more evocative, says Tuck, "much more wistful. He made it a song of meaning rather than just a drinking song at midnight."

Earl Webb, 70, a retired engineer from Bowie, joined the chorale just before Sparks took over and says, "He speaks to us as friends. I'm not very good at emotions, but he brings out our feelings with respect to the music and the words. He emphasizes the things that makes us sound better."