VocalEssence

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Members of the VocalEssence Chorus & Ensemble Singers in Concert. VocalEssence Chorus.jpg
Members of the VocalEssence Chorus & Ensemble Singers in Concert.

VocalEssence is a non-profit choral music organization based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Each year the organization presents a series of concerts featuring the 130-voice VocalEssence Chorus and its core group, a 32-voice professional mixed chorus called the Ensemble Singers, along with guest soloists and instrumentalists.

Minneapolis Largest city in Minnesota

Minneapolis is the county seat of Hennepin County and the larger of the Twin Cities, the 16th-largest metropolitan area in the United States. As of 2017, Minneapolis is the largest city in the state of Minnesota and 45th-largest in the United States, with an estimated population of 422,331. The Twin Cities metropolitan area consists of Minneapolis, its neighbor Saint Paul, and suburbs which altogether contain about 3.6 million people, and is the third-largest economic center in the Midwest.

Minnesota State of the United States of America

Minnesota is a state in the Upper Midwest and northern regions of the United States. Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd U.S. state on May 11, 1858, created from the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory. The state has a large number of lakes, and is known by the slogan the "Land of 10,000 Lakes". Its official motto is L'Étoile du Nord.

VocalEssence was founded in 1969 [1] under the name Plymouth Music Series as a community music program of Plymouth Congregational Church and incorporated as a separate 501(c)(3) organization with its own board of directors in 1979. The organization changed its name to VocalEssence in 2002. It has 10 full- and part-time staff members including artistic director Philip Brunelle and Managing Director Mary Ann Aufderheide.

Philip Brunelle American conductor

Philip Brunelle is an American choral scholar, conductor and organist. He is the founder of VocalEssence. In the course of an international career as a choral and opera conductor Brunelle has been awarded Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit and made an Honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire as well as receiving Hungary's Kodály Medal, the Ohtli medal from Mexico, and Sweden's Royal Order of the Polar Star. He has received honorary doctoral degrees from Gustavus Adolphus College, St. John's University, St. Olaf College, United Theological Seminary, and the University of Minnesota.

VocalEssence has commissioned over 130 new works ranging from brief a cappella pieces to full scale choral and symphonic works. VocalEssence has co-commissioned operas with Opera Theatre of St. Louis (Loss of Eden by Cary John Franklin) and the Library of Congress (Barnum’s Bird by Libby Larsen). [2]

Library of Congress (de facto) national library of the United States of America

The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the de facto national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. The Library is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.; it also maintains the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. The Library's functions are overseen by the Librarian of Congress, and its buildings are maintained by the Architect of the Capitol. The Library of Congress has claimed to be the largest library in the world. Its "collections are universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 450 languages."

Libby Larsen American composer and educator

Elizabeth Brown Larsen is a contemporary American classical composer. Along with composer Stephen Paulus, she is a co-founder of the Minnesota Composers Forum, now the American Composers Forum.

The organization has released nine recordings, including four compact discs of classical music by African American composers (The WITNESS Collection), two discs featuring guest artist Garrison Keillor, a recording of American folksongs and the world premiere recording of The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass by Carol Barnett, featuring the bluegrass ensemble Monroe Crossing. VocalEssence also re-released its world premiere recording of Conrad Susa's Carols and Lullabies: Christmas in the Southwest.

Garrison Keillor American author, storyteller, humorist, voice actor, and radio personality

Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor is an American author, storyteller, humorist, voice actor, and radio personality. He is best known as the creator of the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) show A Prairie Home Companion, which he hosted from 1974 to 2016. Keillor created the fictional Minnesota town Lake Wobegon, the setting of many of his books, including Lake Wobegon Days and Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories. Other creations include Guy Noir, a detective voiced by Keillor who appeared in A Prairie Home Companion comic skits. Keillor is also the creator of the five-minute daily radio/podcast program The Writer's Almanac, which pairs one or two poems of his choice with a script about important literary, historical, and scientific events that coincided with that date in history.

Conrad Stephen Susa was an American composer. Born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, Susa studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Juilliard School, where his teachers included William Bergsma, Vincent Persichetti and, by his own claim, P. D. Q. Bach, the fictitious spoof character created by American composer Peter Schickele.

VocalEssence has received the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music five times and it was awarded the once-in-an-organizational lifetime Margaret Hillis Achievement Award for Choral Excellence in 1996. [2] [3]

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Dominick Argento American composer

Dominick Argento was an American composer known for his lyric operatic and choral music. Among his best known pieces are the operas Postcard from Morocco, Miss Havisham's Fire, The Masque of Angels, and The Aspern Papers. He also is known for the song cycles Six Elizabethan Songs and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf; the latter earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. In a predominantly tonal context, his music freely combines tonality, atonality and a lyrical use of twelve-tone writing, though none of Argento's music approaches the experimental avant-garde fashions of the post-World War II era.

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Chicago a cappella

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Brady R. Allred American musician

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Stephen Paulus American composer

Stephen Paulus was a Grammy winning American composer, best known for his operas and choral music. His best-known piece is his 1982 opera The Postman Always Rings Twice, one of several operas he composed for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, which prompted The New York Times to call him "a young man on the road to big things". His style is essentially tonal, and melodic and romantic by nature. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation and won the prestigious Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize. He was commissioned by such notable organizations as the Minnesota Opera, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus, the American Composers Orchestra, the Dale Warland Singers, the Harvard Glee Club and the New York Choral Society. Paulus was a passionate advocate for the works and careers of his colleagues. He co-founded the American Composers Forum in 1973, the largest composer service organization in the U.S., and served as the Symphony and Concert Representative on the ASCAP Board of Directors from 1990 until his death in 2014.

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Carol Edith Barnett is an American composer. She was born in Dubuque, Iowa, and studied at the University of Minnesota with Dominick Argento and Paul Fetler (composition), Bernard Weiser (piano) and Emil J. Niosi (flute). She graduated with a bachelor's degree in music theory and composition in 1972 and a masters in composition in 1976.

Music of the Baroque, Chicago chorus and orchestra in Chicago

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Jake Runestad is an American composer of classical music and conductor based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has composed music for a wide variety of musical genres and ensembles, but has achieved greatest acclaim for his work in the genres of opera, orchestral music, choral music, and wind ensemble. One of his principal collaborators for musical texts has been the poet Todd Boss.

Vern Sutton is an American operatic tenor, opera director, and academic. A founding member of the Minnesota Opera, he has created roles in the world premieres of several contemporary operas with that company; including works composed for his voice by Dominick Argento, Libby Larsen, Eric Stokes, Conrad Susa, and Robert Ward. He was also a regularly featured singer on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion for three decades, beginning with its first broadcast in 1974.

References

  1. ↑ Beard, William Randall (September 16, 2008). "You only turn 40 once". Minneapolis Star Tribune. Retrieved October 26, 2010.
  2. 1 2 "Philip Brunelle is new music champion". September 25, 2007. Retrieved October 26, 2010.
  3. ↑ "Chorus America, Awards". Archived from the original on June 9, 2011. Retrieved October 26, 2010.
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