If the NEA figures for the country applied to our area, among the 980,000 plus residents in communities nearby there would be around 30,000 adults (25+ years) occasionally singing chorally. Cut that to one in three to find people in regular choirs, just to be safe, and that would suggest hundreds of choirs in a circle just 25 miles across. Hard to imagine where all these choirs are hiding. If you know where one is, I’d sure like to know.
In the meantime there are a few hundred singers under 25 in colleges in our area hopefully learning about all kinds of choral music and also hopefully acquiring a choral habit to carry on for the rest of their lives. I’m writing this when just about all of these students are done for the school year (though there is still one concert yet on Thursday of this week), so it’s almost too late to hear what they’ve learned to do.
Where have these youth been learning the choral singing craft? At Cal Poly Pomona and Chaffey College, at Mt. San Antonio College, at University of La Verne, at the Joint music program at Scripps and at Pomona College in Claremont. It’s too late now to catch these choirs at work, but it’s not too late to inquire about how to be notified about concerts next year.
Of course, some of the faculty of these programs sing with or direct other choral ensembles that will be active between here and the fall, so you might look up their names to find good music before then. Here is a list of directors from the nearest colleges, in case you want to do that: Iris Levine (Cal Poly, Vox Femina); Niké St. Clair (Cal Poly, Church of the Brethren); Gus Gil (Chaffey College); Bruce Rogers, William McIntosh (MSAC); Charles Kamm (Scripps/Claremont Colleges); Donna M. Di Grazia (Pomona College); Jame M. Calhoun (University of La Verne). Good hunting!