VocalEssence Ensemble Singers

Minnesota's VocalEssence Ensemble Singers have gained national renown for their nine recordings while maintaining a strong local focus in the group's home community of Minneapolis. The ensemble has commissioned more than 300 new works, including operas as well as choral music. VocalEssence was founded in 1969. Its original name was the Plymouth Music Series, and it was associated as a community music series with the Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis, which incorporated it as a separate nonprofit organization with its own board of directors in 1979. The group took the VocalEssence name in 2002. It consists of a 130-voice VocalEssence Chorus and a smaller core group, the VocalEssence Ensemble Singers, with 32 mixed-gender singers. The director since the organization's founding has been Philip Brunelle; managing director Mary Ann Aufderheide is also among the group's ten full- and part-time employees. The VocalEssence Ensemble Singers released their debut album, Dance Like the Wind: Music of Today's Black Composers, on the Collins Classics label in 1997; that album was reissued by Clarion in 2004, and the group has continued to record for that label. VocalEssence has presented a concert series annually since it was established, engaging with some 20,000 individuals each year. The group formed the WITNESS educational program, devoted to exploring music by African American composers; more than 120,000 students have passed through it. The VocalEssence choirs are especially widely recognized for their commissioning program, which has resulted in the creation of more than 300 new works, including two operas (Loss of Eden by Cary John Franklin, co-commissioned with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and Libby Larsen's Barnum's Bird, co-commissioned with the Library of Congress), and VocalEssence has given some 500 world premieres in total. The VocalEssence Ensemble Singers have released nine albums, including four under the WITNESS Collection rubric devoted to African American composers and two featuring Garrison Keillor, the longtime host of the radio program A Prairie Home Companion, produced in St. Paul. Two albums included world premieres, one, The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass by Carol Barnett, and the other of Conrad Susa's Carols and Lullabies: Christmas in the Southwest. The VocalEssence Ensemble Singers were heard on the 2023 release Tina Davidson: Hymn of the Universe, with performances recorded between 2000 and 2005.
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