The University of West Florida Concert Choir from the Dr. Grier Williams School of Music is featured in the National Archives of the United Kingdom’s newest exhibition.
- “Great Escapes: Remarkable Second World War Captives” will run through July 21. The Archives used the choir’s 2022 performance of the untold stories of hope, resilience and ingenuity exhibited by WWII prisoners of war and internees.
Why this matters:
Video and audio recordings from the “Song of Survival” concert hosted in the Rolfs Music Hall on April 21, 2022. Dr. Peter Steenblik, associate professor and director of choral activities for the UWF Dr. Grier Williams School of Music, conducted the performance which included a replication of a 1943 concert originally given by Margaret Dryburgh and fellow missionaries while interned in Indonesia.
- Held on the 77th anniversary of Dryburgh’s death from dysentery in 1945, the performance has been praised by the UK National Archives as a “quality representation of Dryburgh’s work.”
Dr. Steenblik told me on “Real News” this morning:
“Margaret Drybar was a captive in Sumatra, in the prisoner of war camps in the Pacific World War II experience. And she was a nun, a missionary, a composer, and as a way to unite the women of the camp because they were all of different nationalities.
She composed wordless music based on famous compositions like Revelle’s Bolero, or the one that’s featured is Dvorák’s Largo – standards from the classical music canon. She arranged them for women’s voices. And she created a choir in the prison camp that helped sustain their hope and helped them recall memories of love or of first dates or of concert experiences.
And so in 2022, we replicated this concert on our campus and we performed about eight selections of her compositions.”
Dig Deeper:
View the “Great Escapes: Remarkable Second World War Captives” virtual exhibition tour featuring the UWF Concert Choir’s performance of “The Captives’ Hymn” by Margaret Dryburgh and “Symphony No. 9 (Largo)” by Antonín Dvorák, arranged by her. The UWF Concert Choir can be heard around the 12:47 mark in the video.
