Another stellar performance by the Plant City Community Choir!!  The invitation read :

Plant City Community Choir will partner with East Hillsborough Community Band

to present a stirring patriotic concert...

theme will be the support of our troops overseas.

Each person attending is asked to bring a small item that can be mailed to our troops as they protect and serve our great USA.

Although the big band music was amazing, with all it's Sousian grandeur, it was the a capella singing of Rene' Claussen's Set Me As a Seal that resonated with my heart... Perhaps because of the story that the PCCC choir director, Joe Mendolia, told before hand, which he learned from Claussen in a question and answer session during a choral workshop at USF.  Joe asked him what piece he's written that he would never changed - that he is perfectly satisfied with.  He named Set Me As A Seal.  He was grieving the stillbirth of his fifth child due to an amniocentesis.  While his wife lay in the hospital recovering next to the nursary ward, he composed it in 45 minutes.

 He writes himself, "Some time ago my wife suffered 5 consecutive miscarriages. I wrote Set Me As A Seal the next evening. I am struck by the phrase "for love is strong as death", because when I wrote it my actual feeling was "for love is stronger than death"; abiding, all-encompassing love absorbs even the pain of death. If the piece is about anything, it is about the simple but powerful conviction of permanent love that seeks to overflow the boundary between life and death. I can't imagine a choir singing it without open hearts." 

How great is the music that flows from deep comfort.
 

♫*¤*.¸¸.·´¨`