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Lift every VOICE
Chicago Children’s Choir marks 50 years of finding harmony in a world of discord

By Sam Weller

October 20, 2006

It was one of those moments that proved a larger point: Music can bring people together. It was October 2002 and 30 or so members of the Chicago Children’s Choir had traveled to Hiroshima, Japan.

“We were on stage,” recalls Chicago Concert Choir member Lily Espinoza, 18, and a senior at Whitney Young High School, “and all the American choirs and all the Japanese choirs performed together.” Espinoza says there must have been 300 singers on stage. “We were all in our different colored uniforms on this huge stage and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, just decades earlier we were at war with these people.’ That’s so amazing that music is able to do that.”

Today, if you visit the Chicago Cultural Center on a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon, you will likely find Espinoza, along with 87 other young people ages 10 to 18, in rehearsal. The sound echoing through the hulking Beaux-arts building is soaring–a stirring wall of voices that ranges through a remarkable musical repertoire, from traditional choral to modern pop to South African song.

This year marks 50 years of the Chicago Children’s Choir making music. To celebrate the anniversary, the choir will perform Friday night at a gala fundraiser at the Park West.

The choir was founded in Fall 1956, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, by the Rev. Christopher Moore, an assistant minister at the First Unitarian Church in Hyde Park. Moore dreamed, according to the choir’s mission statement, that “young people from diverse backgrounds could better understand each other, as well as learn about themselves, by learning to make beautiful music together.”

It was a simple if idealistic goal. Gather kids from every Chicago neighborhood, boys and girls from a wide spectrum of racial, cultural and economic backgrounds–and build a choir. Along the way, Moore believed the kids would learn to work with people from all walks of life. Over the decades, Moore built his vision from a small church organization to a citywide choir. He died in 1987, but the choir has become an internationally recognized, non-profit organization–and to this day, kids from across the city work in harmony.

One thing is clear when witnessing a CCC performance: The choir is a veritable melting pot. By design, it attempts to mirror the demographic breakdown of Chicago. The concert choir is 48 percent Caucasian, 29 percent African-American, 12 percent Latino and 10 percent Asian-American. The numbers aren’t an exact demographic match, but the diversity is precisely what Moore envisioned.

“The voice is the most intimate of instruments,” says Christina Deaton DeMarea, executive director of the choir. “Even if you are not a singer, from the moment you are born, you use your voice to express yourself in this world. So when we bring the choir together and they are able to share in this intimate art form–they are not only sharing, but their combined effort creates the whole.” She also adds this: “Better a choir than a gang.”

Since Moore founded the choir, it has grown dramatically. The organization is in 50 city schools, teaching music education–often where there is none. There are also the after-school programs–neighborhood children’s choirs in Rogers Park, Lincoln Park, Humboldt Park, Garfield Park, Hyde Park and Beverly. In 2007, a new neighborhood choir will launch in Pilsen. Open auditions for these groups are held throughout the year. All told, the secommunity-based efforts serve more than 3,000 children annually, 75 percent of whom come from low-income households.

At the forefront of the organization is its crown jewel, the concert choir, a group boasting 88 of Chicago’s very best young vocalists. Leading this premiere group into increasing international prominence is a 30-year-old wunderkind–artistic director Josephine Lee.

On a gray afternoon in the Kinzie Industrial Corridor on the West Side, amid the rusted manufacturing warehouses and weedy vacant lots, Lee sits at a grand piano on the ground floor of a brick three-flat. Since 1999, Lee has served as the Children’s Choir’s artistic director and conductor. With her eyes closed and her hands running across the ivory, the Chicago native passionately performs the second movement of Ravel’s neo-classical Sonatine.

“What’s unique about the organization,” says Lee, “and what Christopher Moore would be proud of, is the sonority that the children create is so powerful, and it’s a sound that you can’t replicate with just one race singing.”

Under Lee’s tough yet inspirational guidance, the concert choir has traveled the world, from Prague to Japan to South Africa. Last spring, Lee served as musical director of “Sita Ram,” a collaboration between the Chicago Children’s Choir, Lookingglass Theatre and Natya Dance Theatre. The pop opera, an adaptation of an ancient Hindu literary epic, was nominated for three prestigious Joseph Jefferson Awards–the top honor in Chicago theater (the awards ceremony will be held Nov. 6). Lee also had co-production credit on the companion compact disc.

“Because the kids come from so many different cultural backgrounds, they bring an authenticity to each of these genres,” she says. While Lee has a deep appreciation and knowledge of classical music, she champions the choir’s mixed canon. “It’s important for the children that we embrace their time.”

And the experience is visibly transformative for the kids. When they put on the trademark red blazer, they assume a noticeable stature.

“When you’re singing and you have what some choir people call a `magical musical moment,’ where everyone is touched, you can just feel a vibe throughout the audience and the singers,” says concert choir member John Toczek, 15. “It’s a wonderful feeling.”

Toczek, a sophomore at Morgan Park High School on the South Side, joined the neighborhood choir when he was 5 and later auditioned for the concert choir at 12. He has been raised by his mom, a single parent, and says that the choir has taught him much about “maturity and discipline.”

Espinoza has been with the choir for 10 years, first on the in-school level, then in the Rogers Park neighborhood choir, then, finally the concert choir in 2000. She hopes to study music therapy in college. Even with the choir’s hectic performance and rehearsal schedule, the organization builds in homework time so the members do not fall behind in school.

As for just being a kid, Espinoza says, “That hasn’t been hindered at all. The friendships we build in choir allow us to really be teenagers.” She adds, however, that some non-choir friends do occasionally look at her as “choir nerd.”

In some cases, the choir can even be considered job training.

“The Choir helped me to appreciate the nuances in my own music,” says Isaiah Robinson, 23, who was in the choir for nine years before leaving in 2001 on the occasion of 18th birthday. Robinson composed and performs the music for Chicago’s Silent Theatre Company’s “Lulu.” The live action silent film format play is currently running through the end of October at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco.

“I come from a large family of musicians where everyone sings or plays an instrument,” says Robinson. “But being in the Chicago Children’s Choir really opened the door and my ears to many different types of choral music.”

Judy Moore, Christopher Moore’s widow, thinks her late husband would marvel at the current state of the choir. “He would be awestruck by what has happened,” she says by telephone from her home in western Massachusetts. “A lot of the current initiatives are things he sort of thought about and played with. He would love what the choir has become.”

And it’s the Chicago Children’s Choir’s ongoing mission that makes Josephine Lee stay, even as symphonic conducting gigs offers pour in.

“In a world where we are globalizing without having any education or knowledge of other cultures, [the choir] is creating world citizens,” she says. “That’s important.”

onthetown@tribune.com

Copyright 2008 Chicago Tribune

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