The Choral Commons
The Choral Commons is a media platform that provides a space for choirs and singing communities to realize the liberatory potential of the ensemble as a site of radical imagining. We promote equitable artistic and organizational practices that harness the positive social impacts of participatory music making for the common good and confront racism, poverty, ableism, LGBTQ+ discrimination, displacement, and much more. We produce podcasts and community events, offer educational resources on justice-centered praxis, and incubate creative, artistic, and compassionate projects that empower choirs and singing communities to work for a just and peaceful world.
- Update frequency
- every 4 days
- Average duration
- 49 minutes
- Episodes
- 49
- Years Active
- 2020 - 2021
Racial Justice, Activism, and the Choir / Tesfa Wondemagegnehu
Tesfa Wondemagegnehu is a conductor, educator, and activist. He teaches at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he conducts two choirs and teaches courses on the intersection of Music & S…
Indigeneity and Decolonial Choral Practice / Jace Kaholokula Saplan
Indigenous people have been subjected to colonization for centuries. However, by contrast with several other settler nations, the genocide of indigenous people in the United States has rarely entered…
Girl Power, Creative Youth Development, and the Choir / Alysia Lee
Alysia Lee is the Founder and Artistic Director of Sister Cities Girlchoir, the El Sistema-inspired, girl empowerment, choral academy in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey. She is the education p…
Reimagining the Choir: Chorus America Virtual Conference 2020 / Emilie Amrein and André de Quadros
Black activist and poet, Sonya Renee Taylor, writes, “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was never normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, …
Empowering Song, Incarceration, and the Choir / Emily Howe and Bobby Iacoviello
The Empowering Song approach was originally developed in Massachusetts prisons by André de Quadros, Emily Howe, and Jamie Hillman to create an artistic interdisciplinarity that, while rooted in music…
Race, Mass Incarceration, and the Choir / Halim Flowers
HALIM A. FLOWERS was arrested at the age of sixteen and sentenced as an adult to two life sentences in the District of Columbia. His experiences as a child in the adult prison system were filmed in t…
Disability Justice, Radical Inclusion, and the Choir / Andrew Clark and Kristina Gillis
KRISTINA GILLIS is a graduate of the threshold program at Lesley University and a member of Cambridge Common Voices. ANDY CLARK teaches at Harvard University and is director of Cambridge Common Voice…
Refugees, Forced Migration, and the Choir / Jeremy Haneman
JEREMY HANEMAN is a conductor and musical director who specialises in choral and operatic repertoire. He is the Co-Director of Together Productions, a company that produces ground-breaking work using…