2015 Seattle SINGS! Festival

Traffic Alert

On Friday, drivers should expect major traffic and transit delays in the greater Seattle area with President Obama in the region.

For those coming from the east, please be aware that I-90 westbound will be reduced to a single lane of traffic on Saturday, so plan accordingly!

Press Release

July 1, 2015

SEATTLE- The Greater Seattle Choral Consortium is proud to announce our second Seattle SINGS! Choral Festival to be held on October 8, 9, and 10 at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral (Seattle). The GSCC is a non-profit service organization which provides advocacy, support, resource sharing, and outreach to more than sixty choruses throughout the Puget Sound region. In keeping with our mission and vision, the Consortium is proud to gather together 34 of our member choirs in a three-day event of public performances including featured works of four Northwest composers.

The 34 choirs will begin performing on Thursday night at 7:00 pm, and will feature choirs presenting heritage, world music, folk, gospel, and classical music. Our Friday night performances begin again at 7:00 pm and feature six choral ensembles that begin with the sounds of two of Seattle’s premier children’s choirs and finish with modern choral music. Our Saturday performances begin at 10:00 am and finish at 9:00 pm, with choral styles ranging from barbershop to some of Seattle’s professional and semi-professional choirs.

At intervals on Saturday we will be featuring the music of our four Composers in Residence: Reginald Unterseher, Vijay Singh, Giselle Wyers, and Brian Gallante. Each composer will provide a work to be sung by a mass choir brought together from the performing ensembles that day. The composers will lead the massed choir they have chosen in a rehearsal in front of our audience, and then lead the choir in a final performance of their work. This year we are also pleased to announce the gift of a new anthem for the festival, a setting of “How Can I Keep from Singing” set for the Greater Seattle Choral Consortium by Seattle Composer Frederick West. The anthem will provide both our participating choirs and our audience with an opportunity to sing together at intervals throughout the festival.

We encourage you to come to part or all of the festival, to come and go as you please, and to simply enjoy the wide range of choral music you will be able to experience. There is NO COST for admission to the festival! For more information and a complete listing of participating choirs, please visit us on the web at www.seattlesings.org, or you can email us at gsccfestival@seattlesings.org.

Media Contacts: (Festival Co-Chairs)
Scott Kovacs jscottkovacs@gmail.com
Jeremy Matheis jdmatheis@hotmail.com

Festival Preamble

We gather as a fellowship of singers celebrating our common love for choral singing and the great dedication and skill that we cultivate in order to rise to this beautiful language of musical expression.

Our songs are not advertisements; they call us to our highest purpose.

The singer is not a product but a bard, bent on self-discovery and greater realization driven by a true love and compassion for fellow human beings expressed by the natural harmonies of sound.

Can we build with the sound of songs—a bridge, a community, where each note and each singer and each choir are fully appreciated?

Our sounds come to us free, like the sunlight, and we breathe within us the extraordinary wind instruments that we blend with others.

As our melodies carry us back to the fires of our earliest migrations, they will surely carry us as we set sail for the four points of the globe, and for the stars.

By our singing, we assure the melodies that go with the journeys of our children’s children.

“Seattle Sings!”

—Frederick N. West

Event Photos

Check out some great photos from our 2015 Festival!