“We had an encounter with an acorn,” said Sarah Dupre, the music director and conductor of Acorn MusEcology to explain the name of her Sonoma County choir. That encounter happened at the Oddfellows Lodge in Freestone, where an acorn-like decoration on a door inspired her and Creative Director Robin Eschner to take the name for their choral group.
“We like the acorn as a kind of totem because oak trees are a keystone species,” Dupre said. “From a tiny acorn, a mighty tree grew, and so it’s a way of recognizing that little things can take on great power if they’re given space to grow.”
Like the acorn it is named after, the choir started small but has put down roots and continued to expand — reaching the important goal of being certified as a nonprofit and receiving a $4,000 Arts Impact grant from Creative Sonoma in 2026. The extra funds allowed them to hire a professional violinist and cellist for their upcoming show, “The Earth Says,” which will have performances on Friday, Sept. 25, and Sunday, Sept. 27, at the Occidental Center for the Arts, and a show in Santa Rosa on Saturday, Sept. 26.
“We’re getting our legs under ourselves,” Dupre said.
As the name suggests, Dupre and Eschner take inspiration from the natural world for their 27-member choir, which includes instrumentalists, as well as a range of singers. “We like to sing about the things we love, which are trees and birds and beavers and rivers,” Dupre said. “We’re sort of like mycelium, connected to everything.”
The group is distinctive both for their focus on ecological themes and also because they write their own music. For an earlier program on beavers, the group read and researched the topic, discovering surprises that informed their original compositions.
“Our entire orientation is toward deep ecology and toward using music to kind of explore all of the myriad connections between humans and the other living things and systems on the planet,” Dupre said.
There’s never been a more important time to do so.
“The earth is groaning,” Dupre said. “We’re just trying, in our own little way, to be medicine for the planet.”
Acorn began rehearsing in January 2020, but by March of that year the pandemic forced them to pause — especially since choral singing proved to be an especially effective way of spreading the COVID-19 virus.
“We had to kind of put it in mothballs,” Dupre said.
The group’s full return to singing in 2022 also brought a new name: Acorn MusEcology Project instead of Acorn to underscore the connection to the earth and to move away from the implication of being a children’s choir.
Eschner, who has been with the group since its start and works side-by-side with Dupre, is particularly excited about the upcoming “Earth Says” series.
Her enthusiasm stems in part from the performance of the rarely-performed “Sacred Place” by Chicago-based Alex Berko, which features lyrics by poets and naturalists like John Muir, Wendell Berry, William Stafford and Rabindranath Tagore.
“It’s a fabulous piece,” Eschner said. “I truly believe this is going to be a piece that will be picked up and performed by choral groups around the world.” Dupre, for her part, called it “ravishing.”
The second half of the show includes a range of music, including a piece composed by Eschner with lyrics by Dupre’s late father, Steven Fowler, a master gardener who founded the Peace Garden in Ragle Park and collected soil from every state.
One of the more unusual works in the show is a piece about human composting by composer Chris Ferrera Smith. “It’s a lovely, sensitive, surprising song,” Dupre said.
The show also includes works by Solange Guillaume on piano. Guillaume, a newer choral member, is both an accomplished concert pianist and a composer.
There may be no better format than choral singing to exemplify the need to care for one another at a time when the planet is in the midst of an emergency. “It’s just such a human and intimate kind of sharing,” Dupre said. You know, you’re sharing breath, you’re sharing resonance. “Choral singing is like community on steroids.”
Performances of Acorn MusEcology’s “The Earth Says” are Friday, Sept. 25, 7 pm, and Sunday, Sept. 27, 3 pm, at the Occidental Center for the Arts, 3850 Doris Murphy Court, Occidental. There will also be a performance onSaturday, Sept. 26, 3 pm, at Faith Lutheran Church, 4930 Newanga Ave., Santa Rosa. Tickets are $30. Get tickets at acornsings.org
