Choir Spotlight #1: Northwest Boychoir & VocalPoint! Seattle
Maria Johnson, Executive Director NW Choirs
Check out this exclusive interview with the manager behind the magic, Maria Johnson, Executive Director of Northwest Boychoir & VocalPoint! Seattle.
Annually, 200 young singers enroll in their premier music education programs. These students — boys ages 6 to 18, and girls 12 to 18 — come from all corners of the Puget Sound region representing 115 diverse public and private elementary, middle and high schools. In Northwest Choirs, these children and young adults become skilled musicians and singers with a passion for the musical arts, and the unique ability to perform great choral literature and contemporary works at the highest professional levels. They have a team of 14-15 staff members, who administer 6 different choir levels.
Considered one of the premier children’s choirs in the nation, the Northwest Choirs is an integral part of the region’s cultural life. Northwest Choirs members perform regularly with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, as well as other high-profile performing arts groups in the area.
TOM, GROUPANIZER CEO: So, Maria. Tell us a little about the organization.
MARIA: Well, the northwest boy choir in vocal point Seattle has been around in the Seattle area for over 45 years. We have about 200 students who work with us annually and they come from all over the greater Seattle region twice a week for rehearsals (of course during the pandemic that hasn't been the case, we've been online during that time). We are located in the central area of Seattle in what's called the University District, so people make their way over here through traffic in the afternoons and evenings to participate in our programs. We have two full-time staff members, myself and the music director, and we have about 12-13 more part-time staff members who work either in the office or are part of our music staff (choir directors instructors accompanists and assistants).
TOM: So there's there's quite an organization that's like 15 people to try to wrangle plus 200 students in - how many different choirs?
MARIA: We have six different choir levels. The boys start when they're around six or seven years old - they audition for the Northwest Boychoir and then they progress through four different levels before they get to our top boychoir that performs on a professional basis. Our VocalPoint! group is co-ed, so we bring in girls around middle school age and they typically stay in through their high school years and graduate when they're 18. Oftentimes a boy will start when he's six and then continue all the way until he's 18, so we know them for the greater part of their childhood and it's a very close-knit community.
TOM: That's amazing. I have two boys and they're both singers and they sing up here in the Vancouver Youth Choir with Carrie Tennant, so I know that kind of close community you're talking about. So what about yourself, how did you come to be in this position that you're in?
MARIA: Well i actually was a member of VocalPoint! quite a long time ago when i was really -
TOM: OH, wow you're like an alumni
MARIA: Yes i'm an alum! and I started working here in 1991 as part of the music staff, and then started working in the office in 1992. So I've been around for many years and have helped watch this organization grow, and myself grow into the executive director! Also I direct two of our acquired levels in the apprentice and the preparatory choir, so i get to know the boys when they're very young and first start our program.
TOM: So you're actually both - you're both on the artistic and the administrative side.
MARIA: Yes. So that makes my life very busy because the Executive Director is already a full-time job (or even more than a full-time job) and then I teach eight hours a week on top of that.
TOM: A lot to do I imagine! Now we know each other because you were involved in beta testing the new Choir Genius that we launched in March. What specifically was it that made you want to look at having a system for your choir like that?
MARIA: Well, we're a normally a very, very busy organization. We perform about 50 plus concerts and events each year with our choirs and we have an annual audience of more than 40 000. Of course, this is a little bit different than pandemic times. I've been wanting to refine the way that we have our choir membership organized so it'll be more easy for the staff to manage, but being busy all the time I hadn't really had a chance to research the different programs and and figure out what kind of system we really could benefit from. So the pandemic actually gave me that opportunity - a year ago - to start looking into a choir type of system. We looked at several and I was very interested in your program, and when i found out that you were developing something new or improved and more, um, in-line with what we were looking to do i was very interested in working with you!
TOM: Great! Well i know it's been a pleasure for me because you've provided us with all kinds of useful feedback as we moved our way from having you know, very early stage software, to having something launched. I really want to thank you, as part of doing this spotlight, it's been it's been a pleasure working with you in that way.
Now you sent me some videos and I've taken a look at them and the choir is even better than i imagined. Just sounds amazing. So I'd love to present a couple of the videos and then sort of have you talk about them. The first one, if you don't mind if I pick I'll pick my favorites.
MARIA: Absolutely.
TOM: The first one I really, really enjoyed was Vere Languores Nostros. Which group is singing this?
MARIA: This is our oldest boy choir and they actually recorded this while in “quarantine” we call it - during the pandemic. This is one of the many projects we've done since we've been closed to in-person programming. Each student had to record their part individually at home and then turn it in and our music director edited them all together to present this concert.
TOM: That's one of the best virtual choirs that i've seen, and i've seen a lot… been in a few as well. So tell me about that piece, about how the production was, or how did that go for you guys?
MARIA: Well that piece is very typical of what our boy choir does and i suppose that makes us a little bit unique. We do very traditional choral repertoire with our choirs and we often perform in many different languages such as latin. In a typical year we perform with the boy choir very classical choral programming. We have a program called “choral tradition” that we perform around this time of the year and we usually choose a great work, like Fauré Requiem for instance, and other choral pieces like the one that you just heard. During the summer when we tour, the choir will present a 90-minute concert and half of it will be similar to that very traditional choral music and then the other half more Americana and folk songs. Then during the Christmas season we present “A festival of lessons and carols”, which is a traditional Christmas concert that of course is performed by King's College Cambridge every year. We also represent that in a very similar form with the nine lessons and carols - that's probably our most famous program that we do in the Seattle area, we've been doing it for nearly 42 years now - we have an annual audience of about 10 000 that come and listen to that program each December.
TOM: Will be touring this year?
MARIA: Not this year. We are very slowly getting back to in-person choir rehearsals, but we're still maintaining our remote programming and virtual rehearsals with most of our membership. We actually just started this week with in-person programming with our high school students because most of them have been fully vaccinated and all the others are partially vaccinated. Between being vaccinated and having singer masks and a ventilation system set up in our facility we felt that we were finally at a time we could have small groups come together. Hopefully the other groups will be back together by the fall.
TOM: I know. I really miss singing in person. I do actually get together with my brother and my sister and my sister's husband in a quartet environment and we've been singing in the parking garage underneath her house for the duration of the pandemic. We had our first actual rehearsal in-person now that we're all vaccinated just the other day.
MARIA: I'm so tired of singing by myself and i think all of our choristers are too. You know, singing and recording, and part of it is such an isolating experience. Choir is a community experience - where everyone thrives by having all those voices around them and blending with those voices - and this pandemic has made it very, very secluded, where you're just alone in a very quiet part of your house trying to produce the perfect recording. I think that's what's been the most challenging part for our membership is not being able to see each other. The kids, you know, not being able to see each other and socialize and sing together. And we're very proud of the progress musically they've continued to make during this time, but it's it's been challenging for everybody.
TOM: Oh man, I mean, you couldn't design a better experiment to see what's most important about choirs right? Is it the singing itself, or is it a musical product, or is it, in fact, the community around the choir why everybody participates?
Let's look at another video. This one is live, it's called “You Can Fly”, obviously from Peter Pan. I don't know who arranged the piece, do you?
MARIA: Yes, our music director arranged it.
TOM: What is your music director's name?
MARIA: His name is Joseph Crnko.
TOM: Joseph Crnko. Okay well let's take a look at “You Can Fly”
TOM: That is such a wonderful piece and it's amazing to see live singing! I really haven't seen much in a while.
MARIA: Yes, absolutely. That was one of our last in-person concerts before the Christmas season. That was recorded in the spring of 2019 and then we had a tour in the summer of 2019, a big Christmas concert and then that was the end of live concerts for all this time.
TOM: Right, well I hope you can go back to doing it the way we prefer as soon as humanly possible. You sent me five videos and i'm going to leave the links to the rest of them below. You know, hopefully we can help to make your organization even more famous than it already is - in and outside of the Seattle area. This has been really fun! This is our first spotlight feature and we plan to do more. Once again, thank you for joining our beta program and for being so helpful to us as we got our software launched. I look forward to working with you more in the future.
MARIA: I'm really looking forward to continuing to work with you and having even more of those features added i think it's gonna make our lives tremendously easier and the membership really happy with how much there is to offer.
TOM: Fantastic. All right Maria have a great afternoon.
MARIA: Thank you! You too.
