Classical album recorded in Sauder Concert Hall wins Grammy

On Sunday night at the Grammy Awards, Karen Slack and Michelle Cann won the Best Classical Solo Vocal Album Grammy with “Beyond the Years: Unpublished Songs of Florence Price.” The album was recorded in Goshen College’s own Sauder Concert Hall in the fall of 2023.

Azica Records, the album’s record label, records in Sauder regularly — often multiple times a semester, according to Jeshua Franklin, executive director of the Music Center. Franklin described Alan Bise, classical producer at Azica, as the individual who records in Sauder most frequently. And Bise has good reason to do so.

“Of course, it’s an amazing concert hall,” Franklin said. “But it also is a very quiet hall. The architecture of the building [was designed] to isolate its sound, and he [Bise] finds that really, really valuable.”

“He talks about a few other places,” Franklin continued, “that are great places to record — except when the subway goes by, or the HVAC is on, or something else happens and there’s a sound that bleeds. So he loves the sound isolation of Sauder.”

Bise and Azica Records have recorded many albums and tracks in Sauder, and “Beyond the Years” wasn’t the label’s first Grammy nomination to come from the concert hall. But it was the first to win.

The album highlights the work of Florence Price, an early 20th-century composer and pianist whose work was not widely recognized until after her death. She was the first Black woman to have a composition performed by a major American symphony orchestra, but the majority of her work was unpublished during her lifetime.

In a CBS News article, Karen Slack, the soprano vocalist, said that “at the time, Black women — Black composers — were not being spotlighted, were not being published.”

So Slack and Cann, a pianist and professor at the Curtis Institute of Music, decided to create the album to honor Price. The duo worked with an organization that amplifies underrepresented musicians to select 19 compositions by Price. Sixteen of them were world-premiere recordings.

In her Grammy acceptance speech, Slack said, “Today I get the opportunity to … represent the inimitable American composer Florence Price, a trailblazing Black woman who wrote extraordinary music at a time when it was believed that only European and male composers belong in the concert hall.”