City Choir + NSO: Sound Health Initiative

Introducing our new partnership with the National Symphony Orchestra's Sound Health Fridays - April 2023 marked our inaugural pre-concert interactive event focusing on singing and wellness.

City Choir is thrilled to partner with the NSO in this innovative pilot program, part of the NSO’s Sound Health Initiative. 2023/24 Season Sound Health Fridays will take place on October 6, 2023, January 12, 2024, April 12, 2024 & May 31, 2024. Please join us!

TCCW Assistant Conductor Katie Jagielski leads a Sound Health Friday sing along, Apr. 2023

On the rainy morning of Friday, April 28, more than 50 singers from the City Choir of Washington gathered at Studio J of the Kennedy Center’s The REACH to embark on a new partnership with the National Symphony Orchestra’s Sound Health Initiative. Led by City Choir’s artistic director Erin Freeman and assistant conductor Katie Jagielski, with Peter Uhlir at the piano, singers performed a short program of repertoire from recent and upcoming concerts including W.A. Mozart’s Ave verum corpus, Aaron Copland’s Long Time Ago, Simple Gifts, and I Bought me a Cat, and concluded with a City Singers’ favorite, We’ll Meet Again, by Hughie Charles & Ross Parker (arranged by Roger Emerson).

Because singing is good for your health, for the rest of the program City Choir’s singers joined the audience for a vocal warm up (partly based on Mendelssohn’s theme for Fingal’s Cave, on the NSO’s concert program later that morning) and singalong! With a booklet of music and lyrics created by Erin and printed by the NSO’s manager of community engagement, Xavier Joseph, choristers and audience members alike raised their voices in song, together enjoying classics such as Lift Every Voice, America the Beautiful, O What a Beautiful Mornin’, Do Re Mi, Over the Rainbow, Auld Lang Syne, and more. Afterwards, the audience and some singers headed to the Kennedy Center concert hall for the NSO’s performance of Schubert and Mendelssohn.

The members of City Choir who took part were moved just as much as the audience. “There was a woman in the audience tearing up during Ave verum corpus,” said soprano Emily Tsai. “I sang directly to her for the entire piece, and got a little choked up myself. It is so incredible to sing in an intimate space and feel just how much our art touches people.” Tenor David Flaxman noted, “It’s always fun singing the City Singers repertoire, but watching Erin instruct the audience on some aspects of singing and then joining them for a singalong was a real treat. City Choir is about music and community!”

The City Choir of Washington is excited to continue its partnership with the National Symphony Orchestra in the 2023-2024 season, leading multiple Friday morning sings as part of the NSO’s Sound Health initiative. We are very grateful to Xavier Joseph and Genevieve Twomey of the NSO for giving us this wonderful opportunity to spread our love of music throughout the greater DC area, and we look forward to more collaborations in the future.