Making a Soulful Noise
Under Chorale Director, Singers Connect With Something Bigger

By Lonnae O'Neal Parker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 22, 2005

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."

That's part of his gift, Tuck says, noting that the group has added more than 30 members since Sparks began directing. "He's just got everybody feeling that they belong to something more than just showing up at the center for a meeting. We're part of something." Especially at Christmas.

And those listening are moved, as well. Patricia Anderson, a retired medical assistant from Glendale, attended the program with her 11-year-old granddaughter Crystal Smart. The Christmas music, she says, "gets into your soul."

Sparks started directing the seniors in fall 2003, when the original director of the months-old chorus fell ill. Although he had never directed a chorale before, under his guidance the seniors put on their first Christmas program after only three rehearsals together. And what Sparks had intended to be a temporary gig just out of the University of Pittsburgh graduate school, where he earned his master's in music composition, became a permanent job. He was as surprised as anyone to find such harmony.

"After the concert, they marveled at what they had accomplished and they believed in themselves," Sparks says. "That you're able to connect with them and inspire them, that's my fuel. Some people, they'd like to make a million bucks; I see one person light up inspired, and that's what sets me off."

In the living room of the Millersville home he shares with his parents, Sparks is still and thoughtful -- unlike the animated young man in concert, so alive with the sound of music. He laughs at the suggestion that he's grown his brown hair to his shoulders to look more like Jesus for Christmas. He's actually growing it out to donate to Locks of Love, which makes wigs for sick children.

He's thought a lot about music and meaning and the ways it puts him in touch with his spirituality. "Music is something that has no physical reality that you can grasp onto. Because of that, it touches us on a more visceral and emotional level," he says. He points out the difference between the technical precision of striking the right notes in sequence and the spiritual aspects of feeling someone's creativity.

He recalls once playing on the piano a piece by French composer Claude Debussy and being reminded of waterfalls and woods and a natural outdoor serenity. After he finished playing, someone came up to him and described in perfect detail what he had been thinking as he played.

"I was like 'Whoa!' " Sparks says. "It's a little overwhelming to realize the power and depth of communication you can get through music."

He has felt it all his life. When he was growing up in Bowie, his mother, Paula, the chorale's accompanist, always played piano, guitar and harmonica. She taught Craig and his older brother their phone number and ABCs by setting them to a tune, and every season, they'd invite friends and family over for a holiday singalong. Every Christmas Eve, they'd go to church and sing.

"I can't hear 'Silent Night' without thinking about the candle lighting," Sparks says. "It goes from person to person until the church is all aglow." The message behind the candles, "that the light of the world is lit within each of us," is what Sparks says the song evokes. It's when those words are carried along by the strains of the music that they achieve their fullest power.

It is this fullness he wants to share. In addition to directing the Bowie Senior Chorale, Sparks is music director at Ark & Dove Presbyterian Church in Odenton, where he leads a youth class in worship skills through music and directs children in the Christmas pageant.

As the children perform the story of Jesus in the manger, Sparks plays the piano, and now his littlest singers lift their voices in song. The smallest of the three wise men, 8-year-old Madeline Beaudry of Odenton, says the songs "make me feel like when baby Jesus was born."

"I like 'Jingle Bells,' " says Zachary Rosenthal, 8, of Severn. "Yep, I just ring the bells and see all the smiles on people's face when they hear them."

All week, Sparks is at his church, as the crescendo builds to Christmas Eve. There will be Bach and a gospel medley he arranged. As members of the congregation sing "Silent Night" and hold out candles, he will play the piano, hair swaying, his music joining them all to the light of the world.