Salutation to the Dawn

Commissioned by Cantiamo Girls Choir, Jackie Hawley, Artistic Director, for the 15th anniversary of the Cantiamo Choirs of Ottawa. It was premiered in June 2018.

Practice tracks are available below!
The parts are weighted and balanced so that the dominant part plays mainly through the left speaker of your headphones or device. For example, if you are using the Alto 1 track, you will hear the Alto 1 line most prominently through the left headphone, and all parts more quietly through the right headphone. Singers can practice three ways: 1. using just the left headphone to hear their part more, 2. using both headphones to hear everything with their own part loudest, or 3. for a challenge, using the right headphone only to hear everything.

The bundle of rehearsal tracks also includes a sound file with all parts balanced equally.

A Note from a Cantiamo Chorister

This is excerpted from a 2023 letter to Cantiamo Choirs founding artistic director, Jackie Hawley, and is shared here with the writer’s permission.

I still remember back when I was in Grade Eight, I wasn’t in the choir yet, but a friend of mine was. She invited me to her concert and I remember hearing “Salutation to the Dawn.” I’m fairly sure it was the greatest thing I had ever heard. I was frozen in my seat, completely enthralled. Before that day, I had grown to shrug off music. I had given up on singing because I just didn’t know what it was capable of doing in a soul. Then I heard that song and decided that singing would have a place in my life, that singing had to have a place in my life.
~Hannah Admiral, Cantiamo Girls Choir member