The singers for Friday’s Multi-Cultural Concert will perform using various foreign language from Hebrew to Korean throughout the night.

Eastern’s Concert Choir, University Mixed Chorus and Percussion Ensemble will all be performing together for the only time this year

The concert is Friday at 7:30 p.m., but there will be a pre-concert by the percussion ensemble in the lobby at 7:10 p.m.

Janet McCumber, the director of the University Mixed Chorus, said the men in both the choirs are going to do a set of pieces with the Percussion Ensemble. The women of both choirs will be performing with a piano four-hands accompaniment, or with the accompaniment of a piano with two players.

During the performance both choirs will perform a set independently of each other with three sets of performances by the Percussion Ensemble mixed in.

“One aspect of singing multicultural music is the languages, and the singers for this concert have to perform in Latin, Serbian, Hebrew, Korean, Spanish and African dialects,” McCumber said. “While multicultural music is often considered to just be fun, it can also be very challenging because of the language issue.”

As part of the set during the performance, the University Mixed Chorus will be singing a black gospel song and a slave spiritual, both of which will feature soloists for portions of the performance.

Jamie Ryan, the director of the Percussion Ensemble, said they have been practicing for most of the semester on their portion of the show and the practices have been far from ordinary for the students.

Ryan said most of the pieces were unordinary because there was no written music that the students could go off for reference. Instead the students have been learning by watching others perform or by simply replicating what they hear.

“It’s an entirely new mode of learning for some students,” Ryan said. “It’s taken them a while to get used to learning without music in front of them.”

Ryan said all of the music performed by the Percussion Ensemble independently will be from Cuba, and that the final combination piece will be an old African spiritual.

Admission is $5 for the general public and $3 for seniors, Eastern employees and students. Advance tickets may be purchased in person at the Doudna Fine Arts Center Box Office, by telephone at 581-3110, or online at www.eiu.edu/doudna.

Zachary White can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].