Voice 46.2 - Spring 2023

The Gates of Justice and Social Justice Today Young Singers and Life after Lockdown

AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT FOR CHORUSES

Children’s Chorus o f Wa s hington presents:

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JULY

an international youth choral symposium

Share and explore rehearsal strategies, vocal pedagogy, and culturally sensitive performance practices of diverse choral repertoire with expert choral educators of children and youth.

PARTNERS:

Margaret

FOR CHORAL & MUSIC EDUCATORS

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Early Bird Pricing through March 31 $225 / $80 (single day price)

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Dr.

Hosted by the University of Maryland School of Music at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in College Park, MD. Made possible in part by the generous support of David and Katherine Bradley.

Jude B. Roldan & Dr. Maria Theresa Vizconde-Roldan with Young Voices of the Philippines

Dr. Zimfira Poloz & Dr. Matthew Otto with Toronto Children’s Chorus

Nomura Clark with Children’s Chorus of Washington

Janet M. Hostetter with Shenandoah Valley Children’s Choir

Editor

Liza W. Beth

Publisher Catherine Dehoney

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Catherine Dehoney

Vice President of Communications and Membership

Liza W. Beth

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Casey Cook

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Sing PASSION BELONGING ADVENTURE with

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The Power of a Strategic Planning Process

Sharing the step-by-step process and key approaches behind the creation of Chorus America’s new FY 2023–2025 Strategic Plan.

It has taken me a long time to truly appreciate the power of a strategic plan and the process that creates it. For years, I thought it was just another one of those no-pain-no-gain things in life—something that is not enjoyable and yet you must do it to be healthy—like exercise or limiting chocolate consumption (just no!).

Today, I am an enthusiastic believer and the process of creating Chorus America’s new FY 2023–2025 Strategic Plan has confirmed my conversion. One of Chorus America’s guiding principles that informed this plan is transparency, so I’m happy to live into that by sharing the key steps of our planning process and some of the approaches we took that felt particularly meaningful to our plan development. I hope this will encourage more strategic planning enthusiasts!

Getting our Bearings

Chorus America’s previous strategic plan was adopted for the period of 2017 to 2022. Since that plan’s creation, however, a trifecta of major forces have upended our field and society: a pandemic that created an existential threat to singing together, a momentous re-examination of racism, and far wider political polarization in the United States and world.

As Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Given this environment, in fall 2020 the Executive Committee asked that each Board committee take a deeper look at our plan’s goals against the current needs of the organization and the choral field using these questions:

• Do any goals need to be accelerated now given the impact of COVID and the renewed and expanding social justice movement?

• Is there anything that is clearly no longer relevant among our goals and objectives?

• Are there aspects of the current plan that should become primary goals for the next plan?

The full Board discussed the outcomes at its October 2020 meeting and some significant insights emerged:

• We agreed that the current plan did not fully reflect Chorus America’s priorities in centering access, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI) in our organization and the field.

• We needed to strengthen our own organizational capacity in order to increase access to online resources and peer learning for our members.

• The rapidly changing social, economic, and technology environment made a five-year planning horizon impractical; a three-year plan with flexibility to respond to changing needs made more sense.

During the next year, as Chorus America responded to the waves of the pandemic and all the programmatic “pivoting” required, we continued to gather research and other input on the operating environment, the field’s needs, and potential solutions.

Putting the Planning Team Together

Chorus America is blessed with a 36-member Board that includes outrageously talented, smart, and dedicated leaders who have wideranging experience in strategic planning for nonprofits, universities, and corporations. In order to leverage the Board’s input effectively, we created a strategic planning task force to lead the in-depth plan development work that would be unwieldy with a larger group. The task force was responsible for the detailed deliberations, positioning, and editing that went into each major element of the plan: a revised mission and vision, guiding principles, a strategic framework, and strategic objectives. This group also facilitated the full Board’s involvement in the process.

Organizational direction is a key Board responsibility and so it was appropriate that our Board Chair at the time, Brian Newhouse, became the task force chair. Brian’s thoughtful approach to organization management, combined with his deep love of all things choral music related provided a steady and determined force.

From the beginning, the Board felt that staff involvement with the strategic planning process was critical to our success. Having more than one staff member on the task force helped make this goal a reality. I could not have had a better partner in facilitating the staff’s involvement than Chorus America’s director of programs and member services, Christie McKinney. Among the many talents she brings to her job is a passion for and deep experience in strategic planning. Ultimately, the strategic planning task force included seven Board members, plus me, Christie, and our planning consultant, Dr. Antonio Cuyler. u

In order to leverage the Board’s input effectively, we created a strategic planning task force to lead the in-depth plan development work that would be unwieldy with a larger group. The task force was responsible for the detailed deliberations, positioning, and editing that went into each major element of the plan.

Outside Consulting: To Use or Not to Use?

When it comes to major organizational inflection points, such as strategic planning, it can be very helpful to involve outside expertise to provide fresh perspective and guidance. At the same time, there is a cost in terms of both money and time to fully leverage the contributions of a skilled consultant. When deciding how to structure our work with a consultant, Chorus America considered these factors, along with our intent to approach the entire planning process using an ADEI lens and the level of staff and Board expertise already available.

Chorus America chose to focus our consultant’s involvement on helping us center ADEI in our new strategic plan and throughout the planning process. We relied on the task force to shape the planning process and write and edit the plan, and on staff to create the accompanying work plan goals.

For our consultant, we engaged Dr. Antonio Cuyler, a professor of arts administration and a noted expert in organizational planning related to ADEI, who was instrumental in launching and leading our ADEI Learning Lab program. In this new role, he was a valuable thought partner, leading discussions with the full Board, participating in task force discussions, advising staff, and reviewing drafts.

Focus, Focus, Focus: Developing Strategy and Building the Plan

Chorus America’s planning timeline included these milestones:

January 2022: Strategic planning workshop for the Board and staff with Dr. Cuyler to give input on developing our new mission, vision, guiding principles, and priorities

• This workshop affirmed that Chorus America is choosing, during the period covered by the FY 2023–2025 Strategic Plan, to focus its ADEI efforts primarily— but not exclusively—on those marginalized because of race and ethnicity. We chose this focus because racism is so pervasive in our society and a focused approach will allow us to make significant and measurable change. Furthermore, results of this work will benefit future efforts in equity and inclusion on a broader scale.

June 2022: Full board review of draft mission, vision, guiding principles and strategic priorities

• The Board confirmed the focus on three strategic priorities. We also realized the need for robust positioning and intent statements to clarify the reasons for our direction and the specific strategic priorities—these became the introduction and strategic framework of the final plan.

October 2022: Review of full plan, including high level goals under each strategic objective as developed by staff

• At this meeting, the Board wrestled with language to describe our ADEI focus, recognizing that the language being used in equity and inclusion work is constantly evolving. The Board reached consensus to use the phrase “marginalized because of race and ethnicity,” but agreed that this language can change as appropriate. The Board also bolstered our objectives around ensuring Chorus America’s own fiscal and operational health.

November–December 2022: Stakeholder feedback

• A joyous part of the process for me and Christie was brainstorming a list of choral leaders who know Chorus America and care deeply about its future; with sincere gratitude, we realized the list was quickly growing way too long! We arrived at a diverse group of ten individuals who represented choruses of various types and sizes. Their feedback was affirming of our direction and helped us ensure clarity in the final plan. We are honored to include some of their quotes in the plan release.

January 2023: Board final review and vote to adopt the Strategic Plan

• After a few final “tweaks,” in January 2023 the Board adopted the FY 2023–2025 Strategic Plan. The staff is now deep into developing department-level work plans around each of the strategic objectives, which will help determine individual staff performance goals for the coming years.

My Key Strategic Planning Takeaways

• You don’t need a crisis to assess your strategic plan’s alignment with the reality of your current work priorities.

• Make sure your top administrator and Board Chair have some strong team members to share the responsibility of strategic planning work.

• Don’t go it alone. Depending on your chorus’s capacity, involve a recommended consultant for the overall process or for a part of it if possible.

• Use a sub-committee or task force to do the heavy lifting of plan development, including in-depth debate about potential directions, writing, and board engagement. This group should include key staff and the consultant to the extent feasible.

• Acknowledge the danger of Board bog-down and work towards consensus, rather than seeking 100 percent agreement or “majority rules.”

level goals to help illustrate our proposed action steps.

Keeping the

Planning

Process Moving Chorus America’s Board only meets as a full board three times per year, so it was especially important to make each meeting as productive as possible and to keep strategic planning work going in between meetings. The Task Force met via Zoom for in-depth discussions of the various plan elements and also worked asynchronously to comment on drafts and suggest edits via Google docs. The staff followed a similar process to provide feedback and add high

A highlight of the task force’s work was the creation of a positioning statement to introduce the plan and a strategic framework that laid out the background and intent behind each of the three strategic objectives. These provided an important foundation for the Board’s input and decision-making and gave both the Board and staff an increased understanding of the task force’s thinking that helped us all stay on the same page. Both the introduction and strategic objectives are linked to in the full plan to help to tell the story of how we’ve arrived at this point and what we intend to accomplish from here.

The task force also reached out to every Board member personally in advance of full Board meetings to gather questions and input on the latest strategic plan draft. This helped to focus discussions so we could be more productive and make the best use of

the Board’s time. Thanks to this work, the task force and lead staff were well-prepared to guide the Board’s discussion of the final drafts, moving quickly through the parts of the plan with which the group was already in agreement and spending time on the most important issues and questions that needed further conversation.

Consensus Decision-Making: Our Equity Commitment in Action

I have heard more than a few frustrated choral leaders complain about their strategic plan efforts getting bogged down toward the end due to wordsmithing or an inability to reach unanimous agreement on certain details. At the 2022 October Board meeting, task force member Alysia Lee led the Board to use a consensus decision-making process, rather than a more traditional “majority rules” approach, to move the strategic plan forward. Consensus decision-making is a way of balancing power, providing time and a mechanism for everyone to give input rather than just “going along” with the majority. In general, group members agree to support a decision even if it is not their first choice or they don’t fully agree with every aspect.

The goal for the October meeting was to get consensus on the wording of the major components and agreement on the general direction of important changes so that the task force could move the process to the next phase of seeking member stakeholder input. The consensus approach worked well for our collegial Board and helped us navigate even sensitive topics to arrive successfully at our final phase.

Our planning process has helped to renew and refresh Chorus America, and we are excited about what the future holds for us and our members. Strategic plans at their best are living documents, referred regularly to by the Board and staff to guide decision-making, and we are committed to this for our new plan as well. Over the coming months and years, we look forward to sharing our progress and lessons learned with all of you regularly and enthusiastically.

Catherine Dehoney President & CEO, Chorus

“The future of our field lies in embracing the many ways we sing together to express our common humanity. By centering access, diversity, equity, and inclusion in our work and supporting the emerging leaders who will build the path forward, we ensure our field’s continued relevance.”

Chorus America’s new strategic plan articulates a new vision, mission, and series of guiding principles for our organization, as well as three strategic objectives and accompanying goals that will shape our work during FY 2023–2025.

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KEEP US INFORMED!

The Los Angeles Master Chorale (pictured) featured two world premieres at its Choose Something Like A Star concert in Walt Disney Concert Hall on February 12. VOYAGER, by California native Matthew Brown, is inspired by the 1977 launch of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts and the individuals involved in the scientific journey. The work also explores human life and the shared experience of existing on planet Earth. Inspired by her mother’s writing, Diana Syrse composed Alas de noche while living between Venice and Mexico. The piece composed for choir, soloists, objects, and percussion takes the sounds from a Venetian soundscape and sounds

of a hospital in Mexico City to reflect a mother’s love for a daughter looking to fulfill her dreams. On February 23, Kitka premiered Karmina Šilec’s, BABA: The Life and Death of Stana. The

he Jason Max Ferdinand Singers joined Coldplay and Jacob Collier on Saturday Night Live for a performance of “The Astronaut,” co-written by Jin, from South Korean group BTS. The ensemble also took the stage to perform “Human Heart” and “Fix You” by the British rock band.

©JAMIE PHAM

new opera, commissioned by the Oakland, California-based women’s ensemble is inspired by the lives of Balkan sworn virgins, a tradition that leads women to take vows of chastity and celibacy and live as men. BABA brings to light a disappearing practice of women sacrificing their sexuality and transforming themselves into men as a means of survival and explores themes of gender, otherness, choice, virginity, sexual identity, and the complexities of interpreting these Balkan gender-transformation stories through a contemporary, liberal, Western gaze.

After a two-year postponement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Choral Artists of Sarasota presented the premiere of Listen to the Earth on April 22, 2022. Listen to the Earth is a symphonic choral cantata by James Grant. Its premiere performance incorporated images and video of the Apollo 11 lift-off and the astronauts’ view of Earth from space.

The Crossing made its Cincinnati debut on February 24 at the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) national conference with the premiere of The Absence, Remember by Jennifer Higdon. The new work based on a poem by Athena Kildegaard is ACDA’s 2023 Raymond W. Brock Memorial Commission.

On December 3, Pacific Chorale performed the world premiere of Saunder Choi’s Meet Me for Noche Buena. The work commissioned by the Costa Mesa, California-based choir is sung in Tagalog and set to a poem by San Mateo County, California poet laureate and Filipino immigrant Aileen Cassinetto.

On March 12, the Phoenix Boys Choir (PBC) premiered Journey by Jeffrey Cobb and The Spirit of Adventure by Ryan Gunderson as part of PBC Playlist –75 Years of Song, a pops concert series celebrating the organization’s 75th anniversary. Cobb and Gunderson’s pieces were written for PBC’s New Works Rising competition and selected as the first and second prize winners from a pool of more than 90 entries.

Washington DC-based theater company IN Series and the Heritage Signature Chorale collaborated to present the first staging of the 1930s choral oratorio by Nathaniel Dett, The Ordering of Moses, on February 4. The collaboration featured musicians, dancers, and visual artists to present the spiritual work that helped fuel the American civil rights movement. u

Performing Brundibár : A Children’s Opera Honoring Jewish Resilience

January 27 marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and honoring the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other v|ictims of the Nazi regime.

In recent years, the children’s opera Brundibár by Jewish Czech composer Hans Krása has seen an increase in performances in many countries, including the United States. The story, often performed by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1943, weaves in popular fairy tales as two siblings overcome the organ grinder Brundibár to sing in their town square and help their ill mother. Chorus America members Young People’s Chorus of New York City (YPC) and the National Children’s Chorus (NCC) have both honored the Jewish community and the millions affected by Nazism by performing this significant musical work.

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Young People’s Chorus of New York City performed at The Museum of Jewish Heritage on January 29. The performance featured 40 singers ages 8–11, a live orchestra directed by Eric Einhorn of On Site Opera, and was conducted by YPC associate conductor Sophia Papoulis. The program also included musical selections by Leonard Cohen, Simon & Garfunkel, and Leonard Bernstein conducted by YPC artistic director and founder Francisco J. Núñez.

On bringing the performance to the stage, Francisco J. Núñez shared in a report for OperaWire, “This performance helps teach our children that we must learn about the past and understand each other’s histories to be able to prepare for the future. Our choristers are also learning that, even today, we must continue to support each other and show resilience in the face of adversity.”

In early 2022, the National Children’s Chorus presented Brundibár: Virtual Opera Premiere, available for streaming on YouTube. The project features youth from the organization’s Opera Camp pilot program and the landscapes of Vail, Colorado, where filming took place, to “produce meaningful work that celebrates bravery in the face of defeat, persistence in the face of discouragement, and victory over tyranny by the joint efforts who fight for justice,” said Luke McEndarfer, artistic director and CEO of the National Children’s Chorus.

Later in September, the NCC released Brundibár: A Children’s Tribute to Ukraine. The album, dedicated to the people of Ukraine, brought together NCC students and a chamber orchestra virtually to record the children’s opera on their smartphones in bedrooms and closets across the United States.

The Young People’s Chorus of New York City performs Brundibár at the Museum of Jewish History. The full performance is available on YouTube.

RELEASES

OnJanuary 20, Cappella Records presented its 30th release, A Byzantine Emperor at King Henry’s Court: Christmas 1400, London, performed by Cappella Romana and led by founder and music director Alexander Lingas. The release brings to life medieval Byzantine and Sarum chant and royal ceremonial performed by two choirs, one singing in Greek and the other in Latin. In support of the release, the ensemble performed the program in Seattle and Portland in January—the first live performance of some of this music in centuries. On February 2, Oxford University Press published The Oxford Book of Choral Music by Black Composers . The release, edited by Marques L.A. Garrett, is one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of choral music exclusively by Black composers, containing non-idiomatic compositions from the sixteenth century to the present day. The collection contains a mixture of sacred and secular works including anthems, choral art songs, madrigals, motets, and part songs, accompanied and a cappella.

Navona Records announced the digital release of What Is Ours: Music for an America in Progress performed by Indiana University ensemble NOTUS under the direction of Dominick DiOrio. The album features recordings of works by Carlos Cordero, Andrea Ramsey, Reena Esmail, Joel Thompson, and IU alumni John Griffith II, Leigha Amick, and Moira Smiley, and includes the commissioned work A Chain is Broken, composed by DiOrio and created with Iranian American writer and poet Khashayar Tonekaboni.

The Brooklyn Youth Chorus (BYC, pictured) was part of artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt’s film installation Euphoria, which premiered on November 29. Commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory, the immersive new work surrounded viewers with life-size projections of the BYC and acclaimed jazz musicians in an arena-like setting and featured quotations from economists, business magnates, writers, and celebrities to explore capitalism,

Awards

colonialism, and the effects of economic growth in society.

The Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia and Commonwealth Youthchoirs shared the world premiere of We are Waves on March 4. The premiere featured nearly 300 singers of varying ages and guest conductors Rollo Dilworth and Alysia Lee. Composed by Carlos Cordero in collaboration with Julie Flanders, We are Waves explores the joy, efforts and commitment of singing together and bringing music to life. n

The Boston Gay Men’s Chorus released Music Triumphs Homophobia, a documentary about the organization’s performance tours. The film highlights tours to Poland, the Middle East and South Africa, meetings with religious and political leaders, and the BGMC’s efforts to educate people about the LGBTQ+ community and encourage acceptance and respect.

On January 20, Leonard Ratzlaff received the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal as part of a celebration honoring Queen Elizabeth II’s 70 years of service as British and Canadian monarch. Salma Lakhani, Lieutenant Governor of the Province of Alberta, presented Ratzlaff with the award in at the Government House (pictured).

Alexander Lloyd Blake, executive/founding artistic director of the Los Angeles-based organization Tonality, received a $30,000 grant award from MAP Fund to fund the project Running From, Running To: A Musical Reflection on Ahmaud Arbery.

The project, created by Blake and Tonality, explores Ahmaud Arbery’s stolen passions, quirks, and dreams, and how we are all a part of Arbery’s story. The award is part of $2.6 million in grants distributed to more than 300 artists across 88 live performance projects in 2022.

Maria Ellis, owner of Girl Conductor, a company that creates diverse music education resources for students and educators of all ages, will be honored at the 2023 St. Louis Arts Awards as an Art Innovator. The St. Louis Arts Awards honor the incredible artists, organizations, and individuals that keep the arts alive in the St. Louis, Missouri area.

Emily Williams Burch, coordinator of music education and professor of music at University of South Carolina Aiken, and executive and artistic director of RISE Chorales and RISE Outreach; Trevor Tran, alumnus of Chorus America’s Conducting academy and director of vocal arts and head of performing arts at Fort Myers High School in Florida; and Theodore

©ALICE ROMONOV PHOTOGRAPHY

Thorpe III, director of choral activities at Alexandria City High School in Virginia, are featured in the Yamaha 40 Under 40 music education advocacy program. The 2023 list celebrates and recognizes outstanding music educators who triumphed before, during, and after the pandemic to keep their music programs thriving.

This year’s Grammy Awards recognized The Crossing’s Born: Music of Edie Hill & Michael Gilbertson as the winner in the Best Choral Performance category. This year’s win is the third for the Philadelphia-based choir. The Metropolitan Opera Chorus was also awarded the Grammy for the Best Opera Recording for Blanchard: Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Terence Blanchard. The opera’s opening night marked the first performance of a work by a Black composer to be presented by the Met. n

Appointments and Retirements

After a 38-year career with the San Antonio Mastersingers, John Silantien (pictured) retired from his position of music director for the Texas chorus. Silantien also held the position of director of choral activities for the University of Texas, San Antonio. Yoojin Muhn succeeds Silantien at UTSA and with the Mastersingers. The Mastersingers commissioned a piece by Ethan Wickman to honor Silantien and will premiere the work in April.

Jane Ramseyer Miller (pictured) retired after a 27-year tenure as the artistic director of One Voice Mixed Chorus in January. During Miller’s time with one of the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and straight allies (LGBTA) chorus, the current artistic director of GALA Choruses saw One Voice grow from a 40-person chorus to 125 people and worked with the chorus to tell powerful stories with music. In January, One Voice Mixed Chorus performed Generation, a farewell concert for Ramseyer Miller under her direction. J. David Moore (pictured) stepped into the position of interim artistic director for the chorus. u

On November 29, 2022, long-time Chorus America member and tireless champion for professional choral singing Albert (Al) McNeil passed away at the age of 102. McNeil was committed to the rich history and vibrant future of the African American choral tradition throughout his career, particularly through his work with the Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers, a group that he founded and led for over 50 years. McNeil also held a tenure of over 20 years at the University of California, Davis, directed the Sacramento Masterworks Chorale and the Sacramento Symphony Chorus, was on the board of directors for many organizations including Chorus America, and won countless awards for his contributions to the choral field.

Artistic director and founder of Oakland-based Cantare Con Vivo, David Morales shares with Chorus America words remembering his late former choir director and supporter.

Albert McNeil was the first to introduce me to the beauty and power of choral singing as my choir director in 1963 at Audubon Junior High School in Los Angeles. The diversity of choral music and the standards of excellence that Al drew out of us opened a world that I knew nothing about.

Al was a tremendous supporter for many of us. He demonstrated that what we were about as conductors first and foremost centered on the people with whom we worked. He gave significant voice to African American composers and arrangers in recounting stories that had been too long neglected, transforming such information into positive change. He took his life-calling seriously, educating, inspiring, and motivating singers and future conductors to be better people, multiplying good at every opportunity. We are all beneficiaries of his life and enduring spirit.

Former Chorus America board member and chair Marshall Rutter looks back at his relationship with his former colleague and at the ways McNeil supported and influenced the choral field.

As a lover of choral music, I was always in awe of Al McNeil. He was an inspiration, a force of nature, a musical genius, but, at the same time, a

real mensch. As talented and famous as he became, he was a humble and kind man. He treated me like a brother, for which I was enormously grateful.

I got to know him when the legendary Roger Wagner invited Al and his Jubilee Singers to join the Los Angeles Master Chorale in a concert of African American Spirituals at The Music Center of Los Angeles. I, and several thousand other members of the audience, was thrilled by the music that Al’s chorus created.

Soon afterwards, when I was president of the board of the Master Chorale, I encouraged Al to became a member of the Master Chorale board.

As a director, Al always spoke from a different vantage point that raised our awareness of how we could do better. I wanted Al’s views to be heard at Chorus America and facilitated his election to that board. He was most thankful to me to have encouraged that relationship because he loved service to the national choral community.

Al’s accomplishments in spreading the joy and artistry of choral music were amazing, especially given his rather humble beginnings in Watts. He was a born musician who broke lots of barriers by becoming chair of the music department and director of choral activities at the very distinguished University of California, Davis and then taking the Jubilee Singers around the nation and world spreading joy wherever he went.

Composer Ned Rorem died at the age of 99 on November 18 in his home in New York. Rorem is the winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his orchestral suite Air Music. Richard Coffey, music director emeritus of the Hartford Chorale and former artistic director of Connecticut-based CONCORA shares some words about Rorem.

As I read the many tributes to Ned Rorem at his passing, I was struck by how little mention was made of his extraordinary choral works. While he will ever, and appropriately, be revered for his magnificent art songs, his love of singing was also lavished upon the voice of the choir, and many of these works are of the utmost

simplicity and of heart-warming beauty. A serious look at his publisher’s catalog of his works is highly encouraged.

In celebration of his 75th birthday in 1998, as the artistic director of CONCORA, I had the privilege of preparing and presenting our singers in a pair of song recitals of his works and a full-length concert of a large swath of his choral works, including a performance in New York on his birthday-eve, the composer himself present. At that time, CONCORA also released a compact-disc recording, “Sing My Soul,” and it was in bringing that to life that I had the good fortune of considerable correspondence with Mr. Rorem, all very animated, concise, colorful, and extraordinarily helpful. One, in fact, was a postcard whose reply to a question was simply “G-Flat is correct. Blessings. N.R.” At the end of this project came this hand-written note: “Thank you for the recent performances by CONCORA. It makes all the difference. Sometimes I feel that the world is unaware of today’s music. Then you appear, and everything changes.

Forever…Ned Rorem”

OnDecember 16, Robert Ray, founder of the Saint Louis Symphony’s IN UNISON Chorus, a 120-voice ensemble that focuses on the interpretation, performance, and preservation of Black American musical expression, passed away at the age of 76. The composer and teacher guided many young musicians as a professor at the University of Illinois and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Many people in the choral community shared messages online in the wake of Ray’s death, including president and CEO of Equity Sings Arreon HarleyEmerson, who shared, “I am very sad to learn and share news of the passing of Dr. Robert Ray… We send prayers of comfort to his family, friends, and students during this incredibly difficult time.”

Singing City Choir shared Rollo Dilworth’s (pictured) appointment as the organization’s new artistic and music director. Dilworth is a board

member of Chorus America and holds the positions of vice dean and professor of choral music education in the Department of Music Education and Therapy at Temple University’s Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts. Dilworth will assume the new position in July, succeeding Jeffrey

Brillhart who will retire after 25 years with Singing City.

The Minnesota-based organization, Border CrosSing announced Matthew Valverde (pictured) as its first director of development & operations.

Before taking on the position, Matthew joined Border CrosSing as the tenor soloist for the December performance of El Mesías (The Messiah).

Choral Arts Initiative in Irvine, California appointed Kyrstin Ohta (pictured) as its first managing director. Ohta held the role of administrative assistant for the organization since 2019 and transitioned into the new role at the start of 2023.

The Tucson Girls Chorus (TGC) announced Nicky Manlove (pictured) as its fulltime community engagement director. Manlove also holds the positions of associate conductor and accompanist with TGC.

iSing Silicon Valley announced Rhett M. Del Campo (pictured) as its new executive director. Del Campo, who formerly held an eightyear tenure as executive director at Seraphic Fire, stepped into the position in January, during the second half of iSing’s 10th anniversary season.

Alyson Moore (pictured) is stepping into the position of artistic director for the St. Louis Children’s Choirs (SLCC). Moore is the founder of the American Kodály Children’s Chorus in Baltimore, where she served as artistic director for seven years, and held the role of director of choirs at University High School in Fresno, California. Moore will succeed Barbara Berner (pictured) following the organization’s 2022–23 season, after Berner’s 45th year with SLCC. Berner is also receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the St. Louis Arts Awards on April 17.

The Cincinnati May Festival announced that director of choruses Robert Porco (pictured) will conclude his 35-season tenure with the May Festival in the 2023–24 season. Porco has worked with more than 1,300 individual singers of the May Festival Chorus and prepared 532 distinct choral works for 170 May Festival concerts, 26 of which he conducted. His acclaimed

career spans over 40 years as a preparer and conductor of choral and orchestral works. Porco will be named director of choruses emeritus following his departure.

The Tucson Symphony Orchestra Chorus announced Marcela Molina (pictured) as its director beginning in the 2023-24 season. Molina also serves as the executive director of the Tucson Girls Chorus and as a board member for Chorus America.

The Washington Chorus (TWC) announced a 5-year extension of Eugene Rogers’ (pictured) contract as artistic director. TWC appointed Rogers, who is also a Chorus America board member, as its fifth artistic director in 2020. The Washington, DC-based organization also announced the transition of Anthony Salvi-Exner (pictured) into the role of executive director. Salvin-Exner previously sang with The Washington Chorus and was a board member before taking on the role of interim executive director in August 2022. n

AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT FOR CHORUSES

What’s Working Now?

Los Angeles Children’s Chorus’s Winter Concerts drew sell out crowds.

As 2022 came to an end, audiences that had been gradually returning to the concert hall began to pick up the pace. In December, many choral organizations experienced remarkable ticket sales for their holiday concerts, and reduced concerns about COVID may not be the only reasons for their success. We spoke with leaders of six choruses about their audience-building efforts and what is working well for them right now.

BY DON LEE

“We had our biggest audiences in years at our holiday concerts last Friday and Saturday, and a significant percentage were first-timers! We were thrilled.” Holly Strawbridge of the Master Chorale of South Florida shared that comment on a December thread in Chorus America’s Online Community, one of several posts expressing joy over holiday audiences that matched or exceeded prepandemic levels.

For its Audience Outlook Monitor, launched early in the pandemic, the consulting firm Wolf/Brown conducted a November survey of performing arts patrons that found nearly 85 percent of the respondents were attending events in person, and many others said they would be back soon.

After a fall of fretting about audience numbers, choruses surveyed for this story report that their most recent concert experiences mirror the Online Community thread and reflect Wolf/Brown’s findings that a large majority of the performing arts audience has come back, at least for now. What new lessons are these choruses learning from their audiences?

Snapshots from December: Who Is Buying Tickets and Why

Cathedral Choral Society (CCS), Washington DC

“After our fall concert, we were cautiously optimistic because we were only trending about 20 percent down,” says executive director Christopher Eanes, but holiday performances “defied” cautious expectations by bringing in more revenue than CCS had ever earned in a concert weekend. And there are more new faces in the CCS audience. In its fall concert, he says 29 percent of the audience were first-time ticket buyers, up from 18 percent pre-pandemic.

Despite COVID’s persistence, “people are just ready to get back out of the house,” Eanes says. “They’re ready to have a nice community experience.” At the same time, interest in auditioning for the chorus is higher than it’s ever been, he adds, “so there might be this sort of pent-up energy that’s now being released.”

Los Angeles Children’s Chorus (LACC) In any chorus, singer engagement plays a role in audience engagement. In a children’s chorus, that role is vital, which is why executive director Andrew Bradford is happy to report that LACC enrollment is at record levels this season, up 60 percent from its virtual 2020–21 season. That’s one reason the LACC sold out its two December concerts, he says. Another, he believes, is its stance on COVID. “We are one of the few performing arts organizations in Los Angeles County that has continued to require audience masks during performances,” he says. Singers were not masked for the December performances, but Bradford says they were tested 24 hours in advance. As the most recent Wolf/Brown research indicates, COVID remains a concern for some performing arts patrons, and Bradford feels the LACC’s reputation for “caring about the safety of everybody involved in our activities helped to drive strong ticket sales.”

Choir League, Denver, Colorado

Singers drive ticket sales at Choir League too. Launched in 2018, it bills itself as “the happy hour choir for young and young at heart professionals.” They sign up for eight-week cycles, rehearsing, socializing, u

“I would say 80 percent of the time, our programs have some sort of immersive, interactive, feel-free-to-dance-and-whistle experience to them. That’s all aimed at getting a younger generation and families in there. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing.”

–Emily Isaacson

Audience Development for Choruses

and performing in bars, restaurants, or other businesses. Singers get the first crack at marketing concert tickets via a private link they can share with family and friends, says managing director Lizabeth Barnett. For Choir League’s December concert in a Denver brewery, “the singers sold out the tickets in 24 hours, so we were never able to make it open” to the public, Barnett says. By design, membership fluctuates, but she saw more new faces than usual when Choral League ended its pandemic hiatus in the fall of 2021, and the group became an outlet for members of more traditional choruses that hadn’t resumed singing, she explains. Although a lot of them have shifted back now, she says Choir League remains a brand-new experience “for a good chunk of our singers, every cycle. Their friends had no idea that they were even interested in it. So being a choir concert audience member is new, as well.”

Classical Uprising, Portland, Maine

Before the pandemic, Classical Uprising would nearly sell out its series, says artistic director Emily Isaacson. In the midst of her December performances, she confessed “we’re not quite there yet, but we are pretty close.” Three groups make up Classical Uprising: the 50-year-

old Oratorio Chorale, the Portland Bach Experience, which Isaacson founded in 2017, and Horizon Voices, a youth choir formed when the other two organizations merged in 2020. One goal of the merger, Isaacson says, was to create an “intergenerational space,” one that appeals to a variety of needs and audiences. “I would say 80 percent of the time, our programs have some sort of immersive, interactive, feelfree-to-dance-and-whistle experience to them,” Isaacson explains. “That’s all aimed at getting a younger generation and families in there. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing.” Whether that’s because of the merger, or the new children’s choir, or diminished concerns over COVID, she can’t be sure.

“Whatever it is,” Isaacson says, “we are seeing a very age-diverse audience.”

“We try to sell whatever that experience is and what the story of the concert is rather than just, ‘Here’s the composer, here’s the repertoire.’”

–Chris Eanes

The Choral Project

©ERIN HAAR

The Choral Project (TCP), San Jose, California

“Our crowds were wonderful” at TCP’s winter concert in December, says artistic director Daniel Hughes. In the 27 years since he founded the chorus, “we seem to have cultivated a really loyal following that is very understanding and sympathetic, and they just hang on,” he says. “We haven’t really lost anybody when we’ve come back to full live performances.” In particular, Hughes observes, the annual Winter’s Gifts program has built a strong fan base, and this season it claimed an even bigger share of the regional spotlight because, he notes regretfully, some South Bay music organizations haven’t resumed full operation.

Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC (GMCW)

For its holiday show, GMCW sold out two of its four performances and had “pretty good houses” for the other two, according to executive director Justin Fyala. He says word of mouth from members is an important driver of the group’s ticket sales and, by extension, its audience demographics. “If we’re getting younger people auditioning and accepted into the chorus, then their friends and relatives tend to be a little bit younger. We’re seeing our diehard fans come back, of course, but we’re also seeing some new faces in the in the audience, which is really exciting.” Still, Fyala finds himself wondering whether a longstanding, popular holiday tradition is a reliable indicator for the rest of the season. For some shows earlier in the season, “it was a little more difficult to get people into the theater,” he says. But he’s trying to stay optimistic. “I’m knocking on wood that all of that is kind of behind us and people are really ready to come back.”

Lessons Learned: What Kinds of Programming Are Working?

The recent Audience Outlook Monitor findings suggest the factors that motivate—or inhibit— attendance are shifting. Audiences now appear to be more focused on programming. Whereas COVID was the reason most respondents were staying away a year ago, 60 percent of the November holdouts surveyed said they “have not yet found a program I want to attend.” Wolf/Brown principal Alan Brown interpreted that finding during a December webinar: “This signals to us that people are being more selective perhaps, or their tastes are changing, or both.” u

Audience Development for Choruses

Hearing pleas from its COVID-weary audience to bring them “more fun,” GMCW is responding this season with programming intended to “allow people to escape the outside world for a while,” says Fyala. But because it’s part of the chorus’s mission to inspire equality and inclusion and promote justice and dignity for all, he notes that LGBGTQ+ issues remain prominent in its programming. Hughes’ vision with TCP is to transform and heal through music and words. Focusing only on the “sonic experience,” he says, can “feel a little bit formalized and disconnected for some people.” The Winter’s Gifts concert centered on the subject of peace, showcasing compositions that reveal Ukrainian influences. “The choir has always been really willing to just shine a light on something that needs to be looked at,” he says, and our audiences are drawn to the programming because it feels so directed.” At CCS, Eanes says the chorus is “working really hard to reach new audiences and more diverse audiences, and so we are changing our programming.” This season, for the first time, CCS will perform a concert devoted entirely to

African American composers, a collaboration with the Heritage Signature Chorale.

“We know that if we did the Verdi Requiem and Mozart Requiem each year, we’d sell a whole lot of tickets,” but that’s limiting, Eanes says, because traditional choral repertoire

“will always sell to a certain cross-section of

people. And those people are also aging.” It’s not that CCS will abandon Verdi and Mozart. “We’re simply expanding our repertoire to include a broader diversity of voices,” he says, “and we know we’re going to bring more people into the fold that way.”

When planning a Classical Uprising performance, Emily Isaacson doesn’t start with repertoire. She says it surprised her to learn several years ago that “the amount of repertoire that the normal layperson knows is less than 10 pieces. It’s, like, Mozart Requiem.” Instead, she imagines a production, an experience she wants to create. For example, she chose Purcell’s Fairy Queen “because I wanted to be able to use drag queens, or Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum because you can pair it with meditation,” as she did last fall in a program tailored for parents of young children (free babysitting provided). “We really make an effort to make a lot of our programs available to families,” Isaacson says, “and it’s working.” Isaacson categorizes these programs as “unexpected” experiences—immersive, interactive, informal, often outdoors, and often involving food and alcohol. Classical Uprising also offers a traditional experience, the kind that “diehards” might expect, but she says there aren’t enough of them in the Portland area to sustain that approach alone—hence the “unexpected” experience and a third one, the “salon” experience, which Isaacson describes as a cocktail hour in an intimate, nontraditional space where

Denver’s Choir League performs in nontraditional venues like The Hangar at Stanley Marketplace.

Cathedral Choral Society partnered with the Atlanta Ballet for Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette in October 2022.

the audience can interact with the musicians. “It’s part of our mission to bring great art into everyday spaces and into people’s everyday lives. In Portland, we need to make it available with as few barriers as possible,” she says.

Choruses are increasingly turning their attention to the “audience experience.” The term manifests itself in multiple extramusical ways, from stage introductions and interviews to storytelling to lighting to dancing to sophisticated stage projections. Audience members may not always be able to pinpoint the reason, admits Fyala, “but they leave thinking ‘That was a really well put-together show.’” The audience experience is impossible to ignore when it attracts a markedly different audience—as Classical Uprising can attest, and so can Choir League. At a traditional concert, observes Barnett, “there’s not a lot of room for movement, or noise, or children, and that’s completely appropriate.” Whereas at Choir League, she says “a four- or five-year-old gets to watch their parents up on stage without them feeling nervous that my child’s going to ruin this experience. Or your best friend is singing in choir for the first time in 20 years, and you can go to celebrate his new adventure.” And, she adds, they can get up to order pizza in the middle of the performance.

Lessons Learned: What Kinds of Marketing Are Working?

To convey thematic connections in his programming, Hughes and his marketing director spend considerable time choosing evocative colors and photos to represent TCP’s concert season. They know they’re on the right track, he says, when they can imagine a non-English speaker getting what they’re after: “If they saw these images and didn’t know any of the text, could they see that, ‘Oh, these are all connected’?” To send the message about Classical Uprising’s kid-friendly programs, Isaacson says “we use a lot of pictures showing people things that they would not expect to go with a classical music concert: kids dancing, beer, yoga, outdoors, drag queens, stilt walkers, all those sorts of things.”

In verbal messaging, the chorus relies largely on audience testimonials to shape potential ticket-buyers’ expectations, and, she adds, “we are super-explicit that your kids should show up exactly as they are,

Managing the Trend Toward Last-Minute Ticket Purchases

For many choruses, a trend toward last-minute ticket-buying seems to have accelerated in recent months. Pre-pandemic, Eanes had been watching season subscriptions decline steadily, and now, he says, “it’s also showing itself in the single ticket sales. People really are waiting until the week of or even the day before to decide.” He reports that ticket sales in the two days before the CCS Christmas concert accounted for 10 percent of event revenue. Fyala describes comparable experience with GMCW audiences, and he can live with that “as long as they buy their tickets at some point. But it does it does cause some heart attacks here and there.”

To lessen the anxiety, some choruses have adopted new strategies. Here’s a sampling of their approaches:

Spread the word that this is the new normal.

Fyala has found the “heart attacks” can happen if chorus or board members go online a month ahead of a concert and discover it’s well short of a sellout. His remedy is “a lot of communication to reassure them that we’ve seen this before, and it’s still likely that we will meet our goal or even exceed it.”

Do you usually perform for a full house? Promote that.

Classical Uprising’s holiday concerts have a history of selling out, according to Isaacson, which becomes an incentive for people to get their tickets well ahead of time.” LACC concerts were close to selling out last year, says Bradford. In the fall he used that data and this season’s 30 percent enrollment spike to promote early ticketbuying. The chorus’s winter concerts were sold out in two weeks, he says.

Charge more at the door.

“We have a slightly higher price at the door than online,” Isaacson says. “Between that and the fact that we do typically run out of space, we’re able to use that to motivate people.”

that there’s not an expectation about the behavior beyond, you know, ‘Let’s not hit each other.’” Recognizing that some CCS patrons are repertoire-driven, Eanes is more inclined than Isaacson to focus verbal

Adjust your marketing timeline.

If you have a small marketing budget, start your concert advertising later, advises Eanes. “You can condense your marketing budget into a three-week buy or a fourweek buy,” he says. “There’s an advantage to keeping it really compact. People’s attention moves very quickly. What’s hot this week is not necessarily what’s hot next week.” A day or two ahead of concerts, CCS has shifted ad messaging to emphasize walk-up ticket purchases “to make it really easy for people who are looking for something to do on the weekend to just see our event.” At its fall performance “we did about 10 percent of our traffic on the day before,” Eanes says.

It’s still important for patrons to learn about concerts well in advance, so no one plans to abandon longer-term advertising. But at CCS, Eanes expects it will consist mostly of “soft selling” and social media. Because Hughes sees the late-buying trend as just one aspect of the current audience engagement picture, TCP is adjusting its marketing approach across the board “to keep the audience excited to see our shows and feel like, ‘Hey, you don’t want to miss out.’”

Cater to last-minute ticket buyers. Wolf/Brown’s November survey revealed that audiences are thinking about this issue too. When asked “What about the audience experience might be changed?” respondents most commonly expressed interest in an “opportunity for excellent tickets at last minute (at non-discounted prices).” The response prompted Alan Brown to make this suggestion to the performing arts leaders attending his December webinar: “Perhaps we should be offering a Late Buyers Club or some sort of affiliation relationship that would help people who can’t plan in advance to get access to good tickets.”

messaging on favorite composers or repertoire. But for others who respond more to programming with an extra-musical message or simply might enjoy choral music as part of a night out, Eanes says “we try to sell u

Audience Development for Choruses

whatever that experience is and what the story of the concert is rather than just, ‘Here’s the composer, here’s the repertoire.’” In its storytelling efforts, CCS plans to begin “expanding the timeframe of the concert experience,” Eanes says. For its March concert featuring settings of poems by Edgar Allan Poe, the chorus will partner with the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, to engage concertgoers with the museum’s resources both before and after the performance.

Response to TCP’s marketing efforts has Hughes juggling two different approaches. Older patrons “prefer media that they can actually hold in their hands,” but he knows younger generations gravitate toward digital media, so the chorus maintains a consistent social media presence through Instagram, Facebook, and more recently TikTok, sharing interviews with singers and composers or rehearsal clips highlighting new pieces. Last spring, to promote a Choir League concert in a large airplane hangar, Barnett bought advertising on a podcast called City Cast, “and it was

huge,” she says. “I think that’s probably where a ton of our audience came from.” Because audience success for LACC begins with singer enrollment, Bradford says he’s invested in search engine optimization to identify the keywords most likely to lead families to its website. A survey of parents

revealed a significant number “heard about us through a Google search or through a social media campaign,” which leads Bradford to believe one reason LACC experienced record enrollment this year is that “we really focused heavily on what our digital footprint was looking like.”

Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC

There can be no doubt that the digital footprint is deepening in the marketing budgets of many choruses, but not everyone is ready to make heavy investments. Although Fyala feels GMCW’s presence on digital platforms is “really good at getting the word out about what we’re up to,” he’s learned it does not always translate directly into ticket sales. “We still find that good old-fashioned word-of-mouth is really one of our strongest selling points,” he says. Because word-of-mouth works so well for Choir League, Barnett rarely buys advertising for its concerts. “People have a good time when they’re there,” she says. “They’re having so much fun they want their friends to come.” Committed though he is to LACC’s digital strategy, Bradford would wholeheartedly agree with Barnett. “We’re very conscious about the work that we do to provide an exceptional experience to the families,” he says. “One of the benefits to that is that they then help us by going out and spreading the word.”

“It’s just a continual goal to keep expanding the net,” Hughes observes. “How can we get more people interested in us?” Rethinking customer relationships is a “big

burning issue” in the performing arts today, notes Alan Brown, and he believes serious research is a good way to address it. Classical Uprising and LACC both plan surveys that will deepen their understanding of the factors that drive audience attendance. GMCW is already working on a strategic marketing project with Compass, a firm that provides pro bono consulting services to nonprofits in several metro areas. They’ll study what motivates current patrons, but because “our audiences tend to be very niche,” Fyala says they will also identify ways to broaden the organization’s reach. “We want to let everybody know that

GMCW is a chorus that everybody can enjoy, whether you are part of the LGBTQplus-and-ally community or not.”

Learning how to forge connections with more diverse audiences begins with conversation and collaboration, as far as Eanes is concerned. For its March concert of music by African American composers, he says CCS is partnering with DC-area HBCUs, churches, and affinity groups and listening to their stories about the music’s meaning. It’s too soon for him to say how well that particular effort will work. But emerging from the pandemic, he’s noticed “much more diversity” among CCS’s new ticket buyers, and he attributes that to “trying to tell the story differently, expanding our programming, speaking to a broader audience, speaking about things that are relevant to people today, and engaging people in art in a way that moves them.” n

Don Lee is a media producer, editor, writer, and amateur choral singer who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. At NPR in Washington DC, he was the executive producer of Performance Today

“We still find that good old-fashioned word-of-mouth is really one of our strongest selling points.”

–Justin Fyala

JUSTICE RESOUNDING

Dave Brubeck and Contemporary Responses to The Gates of Justice

A revival of The Gates of Justice anchored a three-day festival that the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience presented February 26-28 in Los Angeles. Leading up to the performance, artists and scholars involved with the festival reflected on the significance of Brubeck’s trailblazing cantata and how music and choral singing continue to be vehicles for probing issues of race and social justice.

BY THOMAS MAY

No matter what focus the quest for social justice takes, music’s power to unify and inspire its participants remains a constant. Freedom songs, union songs, African American spirituals and gospel: all of these played an indispensable role, respectively, in the struggle against apartheid, the push for workers’ rights, and the mid-20th-century Civil Rights Movement.

With The Gates of Justice, his ambitious, trailblazing cantata from 1969 (scored for two soloists and chorus; an orchestra of brass,

percussion, and organ; and jazz trio), Dave Brubeck articulated in musical form his understanding of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic, era-defining dream of transformative social justice. In the process, Brubeck sought to reconcile the division perceived to be growing between Black and Jewish communities in the aftermath of King’s assassination in 1968.

A revival of The Gates of Justice will serve as the anchor for a three-day festival that the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience is presenting February 26–28 in Los Angeles. A timelier choice to launch the Milken Center’s new Music and Justice project would be hard to imagine. Music and Justice will comprise a series of concerts, scholarly presentations, and dialogue that will probe issues of race and social justice in contemporary life.

Enacting Brubeck’s Vision at the Milken Center

“Because of their long history of suffering, Jews and American Blacks know better than any other people the consequences of hate and alienation,” Brubeck wrote in his original program note for The Gates of Justice. The work weaves together aspects of both musical traditions with

his innovative jazz style at its most expansive, including improvisatory interludes by his jazz trio of piano, bass, and drums. Iola Brubeck, the composer’s wife, crafted the libretto for the cantata from a collage of biblical passages, Hebrew prayers, spirituals, and excerpts from King’s speeches and the writings of the ancient Jewish sage Hillel, along with her own lyrics.

“We’re trying to enact the vision that Dave and Iola Brubeck put into the work,” explains Mark Kligman (pictured), director of the Milken Center, which opened in 2020 at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music; The Gates of Justice festival marks the Center’s public inauguration following the pandemic. Enacting that vision means bringing together performers from both the African American and the Jewish communities in a partnership to realize the conversation that is symbolized in musical terms within The Gates of Justice itself.

“But we want to take that a step further,” Kligman says. The first part of the concert program thus presents a contemporary perspective on music and social justice issues. It includes six works by living composers. Two of these will be given their world premieres: Dear Freedom Rider by Diane White-Clayton and I Dream a World by Arturo O’Farrill. The concert will be performed twice: at Royce Hall on the UCLA

campus to open the festival (in a live-streamed event) and again at Holman United Methodist Church in Mid City LA, a landmark for African American Angelenos.

Between these performances, an entire day will be devoted to a conference featuring musicians and leading scholars of jazz, African American studies, and Judaism. They will dialogue about the legacy of Brubeck’s work and about current thinking with regard to race, social justice, Black-Jewish allyship, and the implications of all this for artistic practice.

The Power of the Voice: Symbolic and Real

The Gates of Justice makes strikingly symbolic use of its vocal forces. The two main solo roles, tenor and baritone, represent a Jewish and African American presence, respectively. They are “composite characters,” as Brubeck describes them, with the tenor standing for “the prophetic voice of Hebrew tradition” while the baritone, “whose melodies stem from the blues and spirituals, is the symbol of contemporary man.” He is moreover meant to remind people “of all faiths” that “divine mandates are still waiting to be fulfilled.” u

The tenor part’s punishingly high tessitura suggests “higher ideals, something that is awe inspiring and almost heavenly. You realize immediately all the ways in which humanity and society have fallen short of those high ideals.”

–Azi Schwartz

Dave Brubeck during a 1970 performance of The Gates of Justice

©MILKEN FAMILY FOUNDATION

Justice Resounding

Azi Schwartz, Senior Cantor of Park Avenue Synagogue, is taking on the cantorial tenor part for the first time. He suggests that its punishingly high tessitura suggests “higher ideals, something that is awe inspiring and almost heavenly. You realize immediately all the ways in which humanity and society have fallen short of those high ideals.” The baritone (who will be sung by Phillip Bullock) also evokes a prophetic presence and, according to Schwartz, is “closer the voice of the people.”

In some of the cantata’s most-impassioned moments, Brubeck blends the two solo voices to powerful effect—as if Isaiah were chiming in with Martin Luther King, Jr. Like J.S. Bach’s Passions, The Gates of Justice is constructed around pillar-like choruses that bear the entire 12-movement structure aloft. Brubeck extended the metaphor of his cantata as a bridge between communities to delineate this architecture, likening the “improvisations, solos, and choral responses” to “the interweaving cables that span from anchoring piers.” The chorus itself he depicted as “the voice of the people who have been pawns of history … the awesome force of the unheard millions battering at the man-made barriers which have separated men [sic] from each other, and consequently from knowing the nature of God.”

At “the heart of the cantata,” they erupt with “the plea, demand, and exhortation: ‘Open the Gates of Justice!’”

Brubeck’s dramatic strategy for the chorus makes Gates an especially compelling vehicle for emphasizing the connection between Black and Jewish communities at the work’s core. The chorus combines references to worship and spirituality with the power of political protest.

“It’s also a Greek chorus, where the audience can imagine themselves in that place,” explains Kelsey Klotz, a musicologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte whose just-published, illuminating book on the composer, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford University Press), reconsiders standard historical accounts of jazz. She describes how Brubeck treats the chorus “as a weapon to

“As an art form that involves words, we tell stories and we show perspectives. With a choir, you get to show many identities at once.”

–Alexander Lloyd Blake

Dave Brubeck’s sons Chris (bass), Darius (piano), and Dan (drums) as the jazz trio for the performances at the Milken Center’s festival.

be used against barriers that separate people— like a battering ram” in the pivotal third movement. This is juxtaposed with a moving, Bach-like chorale that holds out “a picture of how we could work together to create some thing beautiful. But he goes back to the frenetic energy of the first part of the movement to remind us that we’re not actually there yet.”

The chorus for the Music and Justice performances will combine singers from local African American churches, synagogues, UCLA students, and Tonality, a Los Angelesbased vocal ensemble founded and led by Alexander Lloyd Blake. Winner of the 2020 Chorus America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, Tonality is dedi cated to themes of social justice. Choral singing is an ideal vehicle for this in multiple ways, Blake explains. “As an art form that involves words, we tell stories and we show perspectives. With a choir, you get to show many identities at once”—which corresponds with the power ful message of Joel Thompson’s setting of a Langston Hughes poem in one of the four contemporary works Tonality will perform on the first half of the program. Even in the process of creating and rehearsing, of negotiating “how we lead and how we listen,” a chorus for Blake “embodies the ideal situation in which all communities should act.”

Behind the Creation of The Gates of Justice

The appearance of Dave Brubeck’s sons Darius (piano), Chris (bass), and Dan (drums) as the jazz trio for these performances adds a personal note to the Milken Center’s festival. All three have followed in their father’s footsteps as professional musicians and have performed together in various formations: but these concerts mark the first time they are joining to play as the trio in The Gates of Justice, which tallied more than 100 performances by the time of Brubeck’s death in 2012.

In recent conversations, both Chris and Darius Brubeck shared memories of their parents’ commitment to the struggle for civil rights—a passion that emanates from The Gates of Justice and Brubeck’s other large-scale sacred music works. “He was insisting on racial integration already when he began leading his first band as a private first class in World War II,” recalls Darius Brubeck. Later, with the classic formation of the Dave Brubeck Quartet (which underwent several shifts of personnel), he “hit—and sometimes broke u

Artistic Director

Kristina Nakagawa

CONGRATULATIONS!

Vivace Youth Chorus

20 Years

Resounding Achord

10 Years

Justice Resounding

down—barriers of what at the time was legal segregation.”

Darius refers to the famous cancellation of a 1960 tour of segregationist colleges across the South when his father was asked not to allow the new Black bassist Eugene Wright onstage. (Wright had initially joined the Quartet in 1958 as part of a major U.S. State Department tour.) “He had to sacrifice a lot of well-paying jobs to do that. But he felt he couldn’t simply criticize segregation without doing something about it.”

Chris Brubeck—both he and Darius are composers as well—points out that the impulse to write The Gates of Justice even stretches back to his father’s early experiences in World War II. Because he was singled out to form what became “the Wolf Pack Band” while in France, Brubeck was spared at the last minute from being sent to the frontline. But the incomprehensible inhumanity he witnessed in war-torn Europe had a traumatic effect that haunted him long after: “He told me that [Gates of Justice] was something he had wanted

to write ever since those war years. He thought, ‘If I survive this, I’m going to figure out how to write for orchestra and chorus. And I’m going to use biblical texts, because that’s the strongest language I can use.’”

Fast forward to the late 1960s, when Brubeck decided to disband his quartet at the height of its success so he could devote himself to composing on a larger scale. “He so much wanted to write these big pieces

Dave Brubeck with Erich Kunzel and Duke Ellington, The Gates of Justice recording session, Cincinnati, Ohio.

that were meaningful to him spiritually,” says Chris. “That was a real triumph of him conquering a new medium and boldly leaving his old jazz life behind to do it.”

“The idea of a jazz musician’s foray into symphonic music of course wasn’t new,” says Neal Stulberg, who will conduct the performances. Director of orchestra studies and conducting at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, Stulberg points to Duke Ellington in particular, one of Brubeck’s idols. “We should also remember that he was embracing this challenge from the standpoint of social activism.”

The first result of Brubeck’s new compositional focus was the cantata Light in the Wilderness, which inaugurated an impressive series of choral-orchestral works including his setting of the Roman Catholic Mass, To Hope! A Celebration (1980). When he experienced its premiere in Cincinnati in 1968, Rabbi Charles Mintz immediately sensed that Brubeck was the perfect choice to write something of the same scale for the organization with which he was affiliated: the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (nowadays known as the Union for Reform Judaism). The Union

joined with the College Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati to commission The Gates of Justice.

The intention was for a work that would address the deteriorating relationship between Jewish and Black communities in the wake of the King assassination. Brubeck initially balked at the proposal given his status as an outsider from these communi-

ties. “The commission was thought at the time best suited for somebody who was neither Black nor Jewish by faith to provide a musical bridge of reconciliation,” according to Darius Brubeck.

But from today’s perspective, does that leave The Gates of Justice open to charges of cultural appropriation? Jeff Janecszko, the curator of the Milken Archive, responds that there are valid concerns about the use of traditions and musical materials from someone who is detached from them. At the same time, he points out that “Brubeck was very earnest in his attempt to learn those traditions. I think we also have to look at it from the perspective of something that was composed in the late 1960s, when people looked at music a little bit differently, and not today.” For Azi Schwartz, Brubeck’s method of mixing together different styles “is very authentic in how it all comes together: these are not cliches. He brings together so many different things that sound traditional, yet when you actually look at how they are mixed, they sound avant-garde.”

To respond to aspects of The Gates of Justice that have become dated—Kelsey Klotz also refers to “discomfort with the u

The mission of the Bard Conservatory is to provide the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music.

Photo by Chris Kayden

“I’m always fascinated when composers use their platform to make a statement that goes beyond the music to challenge us and provoke conversation. That’s my hope with Dear Freedom Rider.”

–Diane White-Clayton

sort of racial essentialism that is at the crux of the piece when we have a Jewish cantor and a specifically Black baritone”—a mixture of pieces from contemporary Black and Jewish composers comprises the first part of the Music and Justice festival concert. “When we had the opportunity to choose what Tonality would be singing, it was important to find composers who speak to issues that we feel we should be addressing,” says Blake.

Bringing the Legacy Forward to the Present

For Mark Kligman, the bridge-building aspect of The Gates of Justice makes it a particularly apt choice for the public inauguration of the Lowell Milken Center at UCLA with the Music and Justice series. The Milken Center was founded as North America’s first permanent academic home for the study of Jewish American music, “but it’s not just for Jewish music or the Jewish community,” he explains. “Championing civil rights is the core of the American Jewish experience in the middle of the 20th century. And that’s something that needs to be renewed.”

From the vast Milken Archive of Jewish Music (founded in 1990 and containing more than 600 works), Kligman wanted to revive a major work that would make an important statement about life and culture today. The Archive’s 2001 recording of Gates “rose to the top”—not only by virtue of its inherent artistic quality but because of its relevance for the current situation. “Social justice is an ever-present issue in our daily lives,” he says.

The overwhelming sense of despair that was driving former allies apart as the idealism of the 1960s faded has unsettling— and all-too-obvious—parallels with our own situation. Current anxieties about an increasingly fractured American society are intensified by the persistent patterns of systemic racism and police brutality as well as resurgent anti-Semitism. Attacks on “critical race theory” and the proliferation of QAnon conspiracy theories on social media repackage the familiar old tropes and dog whistles.

“If they were still alive, I don’t think my parents could possibly believe that all

the struggles on so many levels in our American society could have been set back,” observes Chris Brubeck. At the same time, he is convinced that it would have pleased his father to find his work providing a platform for composers today—like Arturo O’Farrill and Diane White-Clayton—to offer a creative response from the present.

One of those conversations in the Milken Center program will be with White-Clayton’s newly commissioned Dear Freedom Rider for 11 UCLA student singers, cello, and piano. A musical polymath who is also active as a singer, pianist, and conductor, the Los Angeles-based composer counters contemporary feelings of despair and disillusionment with an homage to the courageous idealism of the Freedom Riders who resisted ongoing segregation in the Deep South by riding buses across states. The first wave of Freedom Riders, in 1961, comprised 13 brave young civil rights activists (including, famously, John Lewis)—a number that White-Clayton has incorporated into her piece by scoring it for 13 musicians and using a 13-tone row (with one repeated note).

White-Clayton says she chose this topic as a response to The Gates of Justice because it also explores African American-Jewish

relationships (a significant number of the white Freedom Riders were of Jewish heritage). Her piece sets texts that an eclectic group of White-Clayton’s students at UCLA were asked to write in the form of letters from the present to the Freedom Riders. “I’m always fascinated when composers use their platform to make a statement that goes beyond the music to challenge us and provoke conversation,” she says. “That’s my hope with this piece.”

“Brubeck wanted to be considered a living composer,” observes Kelsey Klotz. “I think the way that you do that is to put his pieces in conversation with works from today.” The Gates of Justice is particularly amenable to such conversation in its attempt to build bridges and at the same time to break down boundaries—aesthetically and politically, as an artist and a social justice activist. n

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work appears in the New York Times, the Seattle Times, Gramophone, and many other publications. The Englishlanguage editor for the Lucerne Festival, he also writes program notes for Boulez Saal in Berlin and the Ojai Festival in California.

The Milken Center opening celebration in 2022

Young Singers Recovering from Life after Lockdown

BY MICHELE C. HOLLOW

Tears and tummy aches abound. Minor issues and misunderstandings overwhelm. Students and adults coming out of the pandemic are on an emotional rollercoaster. With lockdowns lifted and students returning to rehearsals and performances, choral leaders see the impact of social distancing and offer solutions.

“Social interactions are an important part of development for a child,” Chantae D. Pittman, EDD, director of three choral ensembles at Campbell High School in Smyrna, Georgia, says. “We think of children as being resilient. They are, but throughout lockdown, spending so much time alone caused many uncertainties.”

A study in JAMA Pediatrics found students spent almost eight hours a day in front of a screen during the pandemic, double their pre-pandemic time. The study also showed more online time resulted in poorer mental health and greater stress among teenagers.

Pittman observes these struggles in her own students on a daily basis. “We’re seeing students with big feelings over small issues,” she says, “especially after lunch period. Students might say something hurtful and the ones on the receiving end hold onto that anger.”

She encourages her students to share their feelings. “They have so much on their plate,” she says. “It’s relearning how to socialize after two years of isolation. Add to that the flu, RSV, and hearing news about school shootings. They know a lot more than we give them credit for, and we can’t shield them from social media. We need to give them space to express themselves, their worries, and their fears.”

Young singers returning to choruses face new social and emotional challenges. In response, choral leaders and their organizations are making changes to programs to offer more support.

El Faro Youth Chorus

Encouraging students to express their feelings at rehearsal isn’t new, but it requires increased care and focus when they are also coping with fear of a virus that has dominated their lives for the past several years, especially in close quarters where singing takes place.

Being told multiple times that group singing spreads COVID-19 frightened many. Three of Pittman’s students lost a parent to the disease. A social worker and school psychologist work with the students on a rotating basis. They talk about being up to date with vaccines, wearing masks, and staying a few feet apart. Students are also spending time in class discussing their fears and expressing their feelings in between lessons and singing.

One lesson revolves around music from different regions of the world. The students discuss how the music makes them feel and some write about those emotions. “It’s another way to get them to express their feelings,” she says.

Recently Pittman’s choirs performed onstage in front of family and friends. Watching them, she witnessed them sparkle. “That’s what happens when they sing together in front of a live audience,” she says. “It’s healing for them, for our staff, and for their family and friends.”

Call and Response: Relearning How to be Part of a Group

Many children who were kindergarteners when COVID hit didn’t return to regular singing activities until they were in third grade. During that gap, they missed opportunities for peer-to-peer interaction and learning skills like patience, resilience, and open-mindedness. That was the case for students at the Augusta Heritage Center at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia, a community arts center where Ko Cha’ Ta “Seth” Young is the executive director. “They had to relearn how to be part of a group,” Young says. “Today we’re teaching them to work with one another and cooperate using call and response singing.”

A favorite call and response song is “Come Back Home My Little Chicks,” in which children form a circle with the caller in the center and a child pretends to be a wolf. It’s similar to the childhood game “Duck, Duck, Goose.” “It’s rewarding to see them run around, sing, and play together,” Young explains. “We’re seeing connections being made and it’s satisfying.”

“Students and teachers are experiencing the joy in singing together, meeting face-

to-face, and sitting knee-to-knee,” Young says. “One of our teaching artists said the young students are like little sponges. They’re soaking up the energy and are open to learning to sing and play together.”

While students are back at school, a teacher shortage exists. Some teachers retired; others quit. No new hires occurred during COVID. “Schools are trying to get back on their feet so they’re fully staffed,” Young says. “Operating with fewer staff impacts the students.”

To address this issue, the Augusta Heritage Center made some shifts in its own organizational structure to compensate for these challenges. “We recently hired a program educational outreach coordinator to allow us to have more contact with the schools,” says Young.

The Center’s staff is also creating new programs while searching for additional funding. The Augusta Heritage Center recently received one of Chorus America’s Music Education Partnership Grants to support a yearlong singing course to introduce students in grades 1-6 to Appalachian, Cuban, and Black Gospel music. The Center is also starting a youth strings program so students can learn fiddle, banjo, or guitar.

To date, students have learned traditional Appalachian music, which for some is u

Young singers from Campbell High School in Smyrna, Georgia

Young Singers Recovering from Life after Lockdown

part of their heritage. Others are enjoying call and response singing in Spanish thanks to the Cuban teaching artist. At the end of the year, students performed before a live audience. “It’s part of a community gathering where we celebrate with our students and the community,” Young says. “Everyone who participates feels the energy and knows the music is healing.”

Chorus as a Refuge

When Gabrielle Dietrich, associate conductor of Coro Lux and director of the El Faro Youth Chorus in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was a child, she spent most days after school singing in choirs. It was her safe space. Today, in addition to overseeing El Faro Youth Chorus, she serves as executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in New Mexico. She understands firsthand about the benefits of singing in a chorus.

Founded in October 2021, “at the tail end of the worst part of the pandemic,” says Dietrich, “our purpose was to provide a safe, fun, and inviting space for musicmaking and voice building for students ages 7 to 18. For that first year, we sang wearing masks and sat far apart from one another. While it’s healing to

come back to singing without masks and without social distancing, we’re not totally out of the woods.”

Young students are not ready to sit still. Middle graders and older students have emotional issues. “My classroom tolerance has changed,” she says. “It’s okay for students to get up and move around. As instructors we have to give people more grace. While we’ve all experienced isolation, we don’t really know what somebody else has gone through or is going through.”

She spends rehearsal time listening and exchanging ideas with her students. Getting them to participate and interact with one another starts with the question of the day. For example, she asked her students, “If you have a soft serve ice cream machine in your home, what two flavors would you have and would you swirl them together?”

“Some students are passionate about their answers,” she says. “It gets them talking and laughing together, which opens them up for singing.”

In addition to spending time listening and sharing thoughts, another popular activity is deep breathing. “‘Take a deep breath and let it go’ is a familiar refrain that causes singers to pause and rest,” Alison Hughey, MT-BC, director at Carolina Music Therapy, says. “When my students are overwhelmed, I tell them to take deep breaths and slowly let it out.”

The Colorado Children’s Chorale performs

“We’re hearing it more these days because of the uncertainty of the pandemic. The worst may be over, but COVID’s still with us and students are anxious.”

A couple of the breathing exercises she does with her students teach them to mime laughing and to blow out a candle using deep breaths. “These exercises allow them to stay calm,” she says.

An Emerging New Normal

Cautiously optimistic best describes the choristers at the Colorado Children’s Chorale in Denver. When schools closed their doors and later offered remote learning, the number of choristers dropped from 350 to 70.

“Upon returning to practice we see how much our singers missed creating music,” Emily Crile, artistic director of the Colorado Children’s Chorale, says. “They also missed the friendships formed through singing together.”

“Remote singing is not the same as singing in a room unmasked together,” she says.

“Now that we returned from remote and hybrid singing, we still haven’t returned to normal. The isolation hit the children hard.”

Crile, the conductors, musicians, and others on staff see anxious and depressed students. “Some are fearful of being on stage,” she says. “The little ones want their parents near and we see a lot of tears and stomachaches.”

At rehearsals, cell phones are off and debates get students to express their feelings. They are encouraged to spend less time online at home, too. Debate topics include whether a hot dog is really a sandwich or if Superman is better than Batman. “It’s an icebreaker that gets them talking to one another,” Crile says. “Suddenly they’re sharing thoughts and laughs, which makes them ready for singing together.”

Middle grade and older students see their time singing together as a gift. “The pandemic taught them not to take anything for granted,” Crile says. “They’ve experienced how things can go from normal to chaotic. I think they have a new appreciation for things.”

A Post-Pandemic State of Mind

Understanding what children went through, how they adjusted, and ways of finding joy are themes of a exhibition created by the Young People’s Chorus (YPC) of New York City. Called AloneTogether, this multi-media exhibition allows its audience to understand the experiences of children throughout the course of the pandemic. It takes the form of video, art, film, poetry, and commissioned works by 15 composers and emerging songwriters. It’s written, recorded by, and features YPC choristers. The exhibit premiered at New York City’s High Line Nine galley from November 2021 through January 2022, and will re-open this spring, once YPC has secured a new location.

The pandemic hit New York City and YPC hard. Approximately five percent of YPC’s members moved out of the city. A number of children in YPC have parents who work in healthcare. Like other healthcare workers around the country, they isolated after work so they wouldn’t spread COVID to family members. “A few of our students would slip notes under the doors of their parent’s bedrooms to let them know they loved them,” Elizabeth Núñez, creative director of YPC, says. “Two of our YPC choristers made a cake for their mom and left it outside her bedroom door.”

“We wanted to share our students’ stories and let others understand the confusion, fear, and hope they felt during the pandemic,” she says. “That was the idea behind AloneTogether. We co-created this exhibit with YPC’s young singers and used art, poetry, video, and film as a way for our singers to connect and start conversations about their experiences. It gave them ways to talk about the continued impact the pandemic had on them and their families. It was therapeutic for our students, their families, our faculty, and audience members.”

Núñez says she’s in a post-pandemic state of mind. “What we’re dealing with is a societal state with lots of negativity,” she says. “We lost developmental time. We’re relearning and focusing on joy. Joy is an important emotion. We encourage our students to feel the joy while they’re singing and while they’re listening to their peers.”

Núñez also sees “a state of physical atrophy,” she says. “It’s not just mental health; it’s physical, too.” Choristers are building back their stamina through movement u

The AloneTogether multimedia exhibit premiered at New York City’s High Line Nine galley from November 2021 through January 2022, and will re-open this spring.

Chorus America Officers

Chair

Anton Armstrong

St. Olaf College (MN)

Immediate Past Chair

Brian Newhouse

Minnesota Orchestra (MN}

Treasurer

John Earls

May Festival Chorus; Vocal Arts Ensemble (OH)

Secretary

Marie Bucoy-Calavan

University of Akron (OH)

Members of the Board

Hilary Apfelstadt

University of Toronto (ON)

Jeffrey Barnett

Dorsal Capital Management LLC (CA)

Charles Berardesco

Baltimore Choral Arts Society (MD)

Dashon Burton

Professional Singer (NY)

Iris Derke

Distinguished Concerts International New York (NY)

Rollo Dilworth Temple University (PA)

Mary Doughty Mauch

Conductor and Community Organizer (IL)

Todd Estabrook

Handel and Haydn Society (MA)

David Hayes

New York Choral Society (NY)

Robert Istad

Pacific Chorale; CSU Fullerton (CA)

Craig Hella Johns

Conspirare (TX); Vocal Arts Ensemble (OH)

Anne B. Keiser

Choral Arts Society of Washington (DC)

Robyn Reeves Lana

Cincinnati Youth Choir (OH)

Mark Lawson

ECS Publishing Group (MO)

Alysia Lee

Baltimore Children & Youth Fund;

Sister Cities Girlchoir (MD)

Marcela Molina

Tucson Girls Chorus (AZ)

David Morrow

Morehouse College (GA)

Linda Moxley

Sarasota Concert Association (FL)

Steven Neiffer

Los Angeles Master Chorale (CA)

John Nuechterlein

Community Leader (MN)

Elizabeth Núñez

Young People’s Chorus of New York City; SoHarmoniums Women’s Choir (NY)

Eric V. Oliver

Zion Baptist Church;

Loretta C. Manggrum Chorale (OH)

Dianne Peterson

The Washington Chorus; New Orchestra of Washington (DC)

Molly Buzick Pontin

Pacific Chorale (CA)

Andrea Ramsey

Composer, Conductor, and Music Educator (MO)

Eugene Rogers

University of Michigan (MI);

The Washington Chorus (DC)

Diana Sáez

Towson University (MD)

Pearl Shangkuan

Calvin University; Grand Rapids Symphony (MI)

Steven F. Smith

Berkshire Choral International (MA)

Karen P. Thomas

Seattle Pro Musica (WA)

Anthony Trecek-King

University of Hartford (CT); Handel and Haydn Society (MA)

Duain Wolfe

Colorado Symphony Chorus (CO)

Young Singers Recovering from Life after Lockdown

and physical exercises at rehearsals. They’re learning diaphragmatic breathing, which allows them to take deep breaths and control exhalations.

“Coping with these new challenges requires additional capacity and resources in the forms of new programs and additional staff and funds,” Núñez says.

This is to make up for the staff and funding cuts when many organizations closed their doors or cut back on activity during lockdown. “Now that we’re back, we’re all competing for funding,” she says.

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Alongside the many losses are unexpected gifts. “We’re back and, yes, there are uncertainties with COVID,” she says. “It’s still with us. However, we’re stronger because we’re connecting more; we’re more joyful, open to expressing our emotions, listening to one another, taking deep breaths, and are moving our bodies. We missed out on important connections during COVID and now that we’re back we have come to really cherish being together.” n

Michele C. Hollow writes about health, mental health, animals, and climate. Her byline has appeared in the New York Times, Today.com, Symphony Magazine, and other print and online publications.

Young singers from the Colorado Children’s Chorale in rehearsal