Welcome to our site, our first broadcast venue. To listen to us sing, click on the links below.

New Recordings from Music of the New World
October 26-27, 2007 @ St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University, NYC.

The American Radio Choir records choral music of the Americas for broadcast. We focus on singing music by living American composers, and we also sing American music from past centuries and other music that has been influential to American composition. We record this music so that it can reach the most people, and also invite the public to attend our recordings sessions to hear the performances live.

Like most symphony orchestras but unlike most choirs in the United States, we pay all of our singers and at competitive rates. Our practice is not meant to suggest an opposition to amateur choirs, which we recognize as vital and irreplaceable cultural resources. Instead, we do this because we see an opportunity to add to the art form of professional choral singing here in the United States.

Like many European Radio Choirs, which have existed in many countries for decades, we have a mission to aid in the advancement of choral music from our own land. Reflecting the increasing multiculturalism or multinationalism of life in the twenty-first century, our mission includes singing music from throughout the American continents.

We recognize our responsibility to help young singers develop their professional experience, perhaps most essentially in the years just following formal music school education. This past October we began a Choral Scholars program in which five pre-professional singers age 15-25 joined with the American Radio Choir to record selected pieces, including Gjeilo’s Sanctus and Parker’s My God is a Rock.

Our current recordings were made on June 3, 2006, and October 26-27, 2007. We held both recordings at Saint Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University, New York.

Future Projects:

Our next recording is planned for June 2008. The goal of this project is to record about four pieces which will be made for sale here as downloadable files. The same recordings will also be available here for free streaming audio. One piece will be Ring Out, Wild Bells, a piece for SATB and celesta by young composer Ryan Homsey. A second piece is a commission from New York composer Ola Gjeilo: an Agnus Dei musically tied to the Sanctus we recorded in October. Looking towards July 4 and the upcoming election, our other repertoire may include a new arrangement of American the Beautiful and a unison Star Spangled Banner.

We are also developing our second Choral Scholars program for next fall. Currently we are researching music from Cuba including music by composer Andres Alen. All of our Choral ScholarM alums have expressed an interest in singing with the choir again, and many new singers have been writing to us to ask about both Scholar and staff auditions.

Help make these recordings possible by making a donation to the choir! Like most choirs, we depend largely on individual gifts from people like you. Our current goal is to build our donor list to 100 people. If you enjoy this music, you can show your support by making a donation. Gifts of all sizes make an important difference, so please do not underestimate the significance you will make with any donation. We are dedicated to financial efficiency as an organization, and our principal expense is paying the performing musicians. Our other major expenses are renting the performance hall, costs surrounding the recording production itself, and marketing. To go to our donations page, click here.