Your Incredible Neighbors: Music director brings compositions to local congregation

A joyful sound, featuring some of a dozen new choir compositions, fills the air during Sunday services at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Green Valley.

The congregation’s music director, Mary Lou Prince, also is its “composer in residence” and has created 12 new pieces for the congregation’s Santa Rita Chorale.

“I started conducting the choir last July and had the opportunity to start composing new music for this group,” says Prince, adding that lyrics are written by her partner, Patty Willis.

“The choir has been wonderful and enthusiastic about it, as was the congregation,” Prince says. “I love the fact they encourage me to write music.

“It is very unusual to get such support. These people are fabulous. I really landed in the right place,” she points out.

Prince, born and raised in Los Angeles, has a master’s degree in composition from Brigham Young University and plays the piano and a traditional Japanese stringed musical instrument called the koto.

After college, she studied music in Paris for a year with influential French composer, conductor and music professor Nadia Boulanger.

Prince went on to direct church and school choirs and has composed pieces for bands, string quartets and orchestras.

Before moving to Southern Arizona in 2007, she and Willis spent 24 years living in Japan, where Willis wrote plays using “a kernel of Japanese stories,” and Prince wrote the music for them.

“We got a lot of notice, ... played in festivals all over Japan and got media exposure,” Prince relates.

The local government in the city of Kanazawa, where the couple lived, also took an interest in Prince’s and Willis’ work and commissioned them to write and perform, using traditional instruments like the koto.

“Kids (there) were learning the piano, trumpet or drums, but not traditional instruments,” Prince notes.

Their home in Japan also became a base for Prince and Willis to travel the world, visiting countries including Scotland, Nepal, Italy, Greece and Turkey.

“We both were really interested in the roots of spirituality,” Prince says. “We saw holy places and had wonderful experiences.”

In Damascus, Syria, for example, Prince and Willis met some Iraqi women in a mosque who held their hands and said they all were sisters.

Such travels also allowed Prince to study the cuisine in many countries, and she now offers international cooking classes through Green Valley Recreation.

After vacationing in the American Southwest with Japanese friends in 2003, the two women decided it was time to relocate and they purchased a 9.5-acre property in Elephant Head.

Their new home was completed in June 2007 and includes a small music studio and a kiln on the property where the two produce their own ceramic art works, including a line of animal figures representing the zodiac signs.

Some of their whimsical ceramics pieces, featuring animals, angels and covered pots, can be found in the Mas y Mas gallery in Tubac.

In addition, Prince has started a children’s choir at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation, a group she calls “very progressive and supportive.”

Currently, five “enthusiastic and good children” from Arivaca and Vail make up the Santa Rita Junior Chorale. New young members are welcome, too.

The entire congregation meets Sundays at 10 a.m. at the Canoa Hills Center in Green Valley.

Prince’s efforts “have brought real life into that congregation,” she says. “I feel that there is joy.”

kwalenga@gvnews.com | 547-9739