Trio shares gifts of music, friendship

BY WENDY ELLIOTT

welliott@kentvilleadvertiser.ca

NovaNewsNow.com

Heather Hurst won’t be one of about 900 Acadia University graduates who will parade up the steps of University Hall next week. In fact, she has already left fast friends of her grandmother’s generation behind in Wolfville.

Over the past four years, the music therapy student has sung with community members in the Acadia Chorus and as a choral scholar at Wolfville Baptist church. There is no age gap in her connection with sisters Hilda Allen and Muriel MacLean.

“Love is the best thing in the world,” says Hilda one Thursday evening after choir practice. “Singing is second.”

With a mother who could play anything on the organ, the two Wolfville natives always had music growing up. “That’s why we love those old hymns,” notes her sister.

Hilda, who is a young 85, recalls her first choir experience was in the junior choir at Wolfville Baptist.

When she was 13 she began taking vocal lessons with Ruth MacDonald and Dean Collins at Acadia’s school of music. That was in 1939.

Wolfville school children in those days learned to sing under the tutelage of B.C. Silver, who led the first children’s choir at the first Apple Blossom Festival in 1932.

Muriel remembers, “we sat up and sang our hearts out in the old brick school.” Her teacher, Gladys West, encouraged her to join the chorus.

Dean Collins made his students memorize their parts and Hilda, to this day, rarely uses music. The notes are in her head.

“I didn’t mind,” she says. “It has all been wonderful,” adds Muriel.

Looking for a church choir

Heather grew up also in a musical environment. Her father, Mel Hurst, is an organist and musical director at a Toronto church. She sang in the Toronto Children’s Chorus for a decade.

“So when I came to Acadia I was looking for a church choir. It was a nice extra that I got to be a choral scholar here. I’ve loved it,” she says. “It’ll be sad leaving.”

Heather recalls that Hilda was the first person she met when she and her mother tried out in the big, brick church on Highland Ave.

“She was sweet and she remembered my name and that I was from Toronto. Then she asked if I could sing and we were hooked.”

Over the last four years the two sisters and the young co-ed have shared choir seats and lots of lunches. If she came to practice sad or exhausted, Heather recalled, “Hilda would wrap her arms around me and give me a hug. ‘You’ll get through this dear. You have so much to be happy for,’ Hilda would tell me.”

Heather also volunteered her skills with L’Arche Homefires and the Community Living Alternative Society. She worked with core member Brenda Henshaw and was proudly taking her photo at the L’Arche dance April 19.

Before graduation, Heather was off to Alberta for another season at Camp Health, Hope and Happiness. Her plan is to intern in the fall and work with students who have special needs or in nursing.

“We all have gifts to give and we can learn from everyone,” says Hilda. Certainly these three women have shared the gift of friendship.