Voices of Experience

In partnership with the MacPhail Center for Music, the Minnesota Chorale announces the launch of Voices of Experience, an artistically ambitious chorus of Twin Cities seniors, ages 55 and older. A Chorale-MacPhail steering committee has chosen Dr. Mary Kay Geston, associate professor of music at Northwestern College in St. Paul, as the ensemble’s conductor.

Voices of Experience will make its formal debut at two concerts in November. On Nov.19, at noon, the group will sing in MacPhail’s Antonello Hall. On Nov. 21, at 3 p.m., at Westwood Lutheran Church, 9001 Cedar Lake Road, St. Louis Park, the ensemble will perform with the Minnesota Chorale and the Minneapolis Youth Chorus - four generations singing side-by-side - as the centerpiece of the Chorale’s 2010 Bridges community-engagement project, Sing On!

Admission to the chorus is by auditions, which will be held at MacPhail, 501 South 2nd Street, Minneapolis, from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. on Aug. 31, Sept. 2, and Sept. 7. To schedule an audition, please call 612.321.0100. Rehearsals, also at MacPhail, will be held on Tuesdays at 10 a.m., beginning Sept. 14. Tuition for the 10-week semester is $150; scholarships are available.

Voices of Experience is made possible in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Quaker Hill Foundation. The Minnesota Chorale is a fiscal year 2010 recipient of an Arts Access grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is funded, in part, by the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.