Composer Neely Bruce's Convergence: Some Parades for Charlie's Dad salutes Charles Ives' father George, an eccentric Danbury bandleader, who once marched two bands through each other playing different pieces of music. This event was the inspiration for a central aspect of Convergence: a series of simultaneous, intersecting and overlapping parades through downtown New Haven, involving 700 performers from nearly thirty Connecticut-based musical ensembles. The piece, commissioned by the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, culminates in an epic finale for singers, orchestra, and church bells centered on the city green, in which a multigenerational choir of over three hundred voices sings an ode to the millennium passing, and the one about to dawn.