Northern Voice Festival: New choral celebration to debut in 2015

A new vocal festival funded by a $75,000 Minnesota State Arts Board grant aims at raising the visibility for the many vocal ensembles, barbershop quartets, jazz singers, gospel choirs, folk duos, and other groups of people who come together in song around Minnesota.

With a month-long, state-wide promotional extravaganza as well as two days of lottery-selected programming modeled after the Minnesota Fringe Festival, the Northern Voice Festival hopes to "harmonize singers and communities."

It all started about two years ago, when four vocal groups who have their offices in the Hennepin Center for the Arts began meeting together every six weeks or so. "We started talking about what we wanted to do together," says Randall Davidson, who now is the executive producer of Northern Voice Festival but was formerly the administrative director of the National Lutheran Choir (NLC).

The four groups — the NLC, the Singers, the Minnesota Chorale, and the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus — all noticed "a precipitous drop in media coverage for the arts," over the last 10 years, Davidson says. This was particularly challenging in the spring, when the nice weather goes up and the audiences tend to go down.

"We thought, wouldn't it be nice if we could raise the visibility of the arts with media and through the Internet and through YouTube," Davidson says. Soon, VocalEssence joined in the discussions and together they collaboratively came up with the idea of having a spring festival.

Currently a program of the National Lutheran Choir, the Northern Voice Festival got a boost from a new grant offered by the Minnesota State Arts Board called Minnesota Festival Support. With $75,000 in startup funding, the group aims to become its own nonprofit organization by July of next year. (Tesfa Wondemagegnehu, Classical MPR's Choral Works Initiative Manager, is involved in the festival as a curator, event host, and Web designer.)

The Northern Voice Festival will take place from April 10 - May 10, 2015, featuring singing events all over the state that happen during that time. "There's about 80-122 choral events happening in April," says Davidson. "We need bigger audiences, we need to raise visibility."

Any group that wants to participate simply needs to add their event to the crowd-sourced calendar. The festival basically puts an umbrella around all the programs that are happening at the end of the season for many choruses. They can even add events that don't take place during that month. Davidson says he hopes the calendar can be a community resource that will connect communities to each other and to their audiences.

In addition to the month-long festival, there will also be a Fringe-like event called Festival Days, happening on April 11 and 25 in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Anyone can apply to participate in Festival Days, and participants will be chosen by a lottery.

The venues in Minneapolis are all in and around the University of Minnesota, including Ted Mann Hall. The venues in Saint Paul are all downtown, including the new Ordway Concert Hall. Festival Days takes place in the morning and afternoon on two Saturdays, so that those events won't interfere with evening programming the groups might also be doing.

"We followed the Fringe Festival model to the letter," Davidson says. Each group pays a fee, about 10 percent of the ticketing revenue available (between $100-500 depending on whether it's a 45 or 60 minute slot and the size of the venue). After that, groups get 65 percent to the Festival's 35 percent. Tickets will be $10 for 50- and $5 for 35-minute performances. A Golden Ticket buys entry to any Festival Day performance for $40.

To participate in the lottery, groups have to apply by Dec. 22. The lottery will take place on Jan. 5th at 7th Street Social in St. Paul; it will be an event that will include singing, drinking, and cheering, Davidson promises. "It is an event where people become aware that there is a community."

In addition to the groups that enter the lottery to participate in the Festival Days, there will also be nine headliner groups that have already been selected. They are the Angelica Cantati Youth Choirs, Exultate Chamber Choir and Orchestra, From Age to Age, Great River Chorale, One Voice Mixed Chorus, Saint Peter Choral Society, Singers in Accord, Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus, and VocalPoint.

Davidson says that the organizations don't plan on simply relying on the major news organizations for publicity. Rather, they're taking an Internet 2.0 approach, using social media and crowd-sourcing as a way to get the word out. In fact, at a press conference — where only two journalists were present — Davidson conducted an interview with leadership from the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus that part-time staff member Blake Bolan caught on video with her cell phone. They plan to put it up on social media.

"We're not waiting for the media to be our amplifier," Davidson says. "It's about taking it on ourselves, so this is really about a partnership."

The only requirement to participate is that a group have at least two or more people singing for 30 minutes or longer. "That is it," says Davidson. "It could be a rock group who is two people with a guitar and an amplifier and a bass. It could be the White Stripes. Totally. Bring it."

Sheila Regan is a Minneapolis-based writer. She writes frequently for the Twin Cities Daily Planet and City Pages, among other publications.

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