In an increasingly isolated and fractured world, music literally and metaphorically brings us together. The harmonics of music has the potential to unify voices from all walks of life into community. I have fond memories of friends singing in high school choir and college (going to UTK’s All-Sing to see my friends compete), but what happens after graduation? If you don’t sing at religious services whose choirs are also becoming increasingly rare (or even if you do), where can you go?
Surprisingly, Knoxville has a wide variety of opportunities for adults who wish to make music together. I had a chance to talk to a few and wanted to give you a peek into their communities.
Each of these varied groups have their own unique qualities and purposes, but all exist to harmonize a wide range of voices into a community and provide some joy to our city. Most are ending their current season; however, you have a chance to attend their performances and maybe find your place to sing in the future! Upcoming concerts include Choral Summit Collective’s Flow: Water and Air, the Knoxville Choral Society’s 75th Anniversary and the Appalachian Equality Chorus’ Broadway, Baby!, all in the next few weeks.
Summit Choral Collective
Summit Choral Collective is celebrating its second anniversary. Executive Director Kirstine Buchanan told me the group was founded in 2024 “to be a place that builds community and cultivates artistry.” The founders missed having the opportunity to sing and wanted to to learn from other colleagues in our field. Buchanan reached out to UTK Director of Choral Activities Dr. Laura Leigh Spillane and professor Andrea Gannt with the idea to start the choir. The group grew from 23 tenors in that first year, adding bass the next semester and now stands at 60 members. Summit is working to increase outreach through events like the Rossini and Dogwood Arts festivals and are talking with the Knoxville Smokies about singing the national anthem at an upcoming game.
The 501(c) non-profit is open to anyone that wants to sing (and learn) without audition. Vocalists learn through rehearsals. Summit has a goal of intergenerational music-making with members in high schooler and others in their 70s. Summit is run by a board of directors, who each take on administrative tasks and a set of conductors on a “rotating podium.” A full list of current board members and conductors is available on Summit’s website.
Each semester (two per year), the group sets a theme for its concert. Flow: Water and Air is the theme for the upcoming concert on April 19. The goal is to “have a wide repertoire. Not just secular, not just sacred, not just your standards, not just modern, but it’s a mix of different choral genres.”
Adults pay $49 per semester while college and high schoolers pay $29 ($19 if they are in their high school choir). The group does not want to take students away from their school choirs, reducing the fee to encourage participation in both. The group also fundraises to help expand its outreach with a current triple match for donations on its website Sponsorship page.
Conductors, accompanists and a social media director receive small stipends for their work. They hope to raise enough in the future so that participants don’t have to pay. The group has been accompanied by piano, violin, French horn and percussion and has recently been learning body percussion (snapping, stomping). The groups are accompanied on piano by Brandon Cooper and Erin Coleman on piano.
Buchanan explained that choir has grown from “an idea that I had two years ago to something very real and tangible. We are seeing beautiful things happening musically within our community, and new friendships being formed. It has been a blessing to get to watch that unfold.” Future plans include youth and children’s choirs.
Buchanan said, “a really common refrain we hear is that I haven’t sung in so long. It’s been 20 years since I’ve been in a choir. I just really missed community, or I just moved here, and I’m looking for people to meet and spend time with. And so it tends to be a place for people that had a positive choir experience in their life at some point.” As a teacher herself, she expressed her hope that, though her choir students go into different careers, they come back to music at a time convenient to them.
Summit members are organically creating their own community. Book and crochet clubs have developed. Members often pack their meals and come early to rehearsal for “picnic parties” at tables in the rehearsal space. Discovering shared interests like volunteering at Young-Williams Animal Center is one of the many ways members have made connections.
The group meets at Church Street United Methodist and holds its concerts in the main sanctuary. Summit started in the basement of Saint John’s Cathedral before moving to Church Street three semesters ago. They pay for rehearsal space, but the church allows them to have board meetings free of charge.
Vice Chair Laura Wallace explained the kick-off event each semester: Knoxville Sings. The event is an all-call at which they play some games and learn a single song in the space of an hour and a half, performing at the end. The goal is encourage singers to join them in the short or long term.
Buchanan concluded by saying, “I would want your readers to know that we are completely open and welcoming, and we want anybody who’s interested to feel like they can come and check it out. You don’t have to have a music degree. You don’t have to have sung in a choir ever or for 20 years.”
Visit Summit Collective: Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Knoxville Choral Society
One of, if not the oldest, community chorus opportunities is the Knoxville Choral Society. Celebrating their 75th year, Artistic Director and Conductor Dr. John Orr told me that the Knoxville Choral Society is the largest civic chorus in Knoxville. It consists of two groups, the larger main group and the Knoxville Chamber Chorale, which is a 25-member ensemble selected from the larger group, based on how voices work together and overall musicianship. Both groups are auditioned.
Dr. Orr told me he was not drawn to choir in high school until a chance to sing in London was offered. He grew up in Nashville and was in a children’s recording ensemble who recorded children’s music demos for publishers. He was a church musician most of his life and was called to Tellico Village Community Church. He was told that Knoxville Choral Society was the place to perform and joined as a singer in 2010. A few years later he was moved to Assistant Director and became Artistic Director in 2018.
Potential singers complete a 10-15 minute audition covering vocalization, musicianship and sight reading. Visit the audition page for more details and to sign up. Rehearsals take place weekly with more frequent rehearsals during concert week, including time in performance spaces like the Tennessee Theatre, Civic Auditorium or church venues.
Membership in the larger ensemble ranges from 130 to 140 with around 100 to 110 singers for concerts. Membership currently ranges in age from the minimum 18 through a few members in their 70s. Though some members are professional musicians, most are from all walks of life, including engineers, accountants and law enforcement.
Asked about what motivates members, Dr. Orr said that singers “have an opportunity to sing with other great singers. And, we do really, really good repertoire, and we do it really well.” He added that some had great college choir experiences and “want to recreate that.” Music includes modern, classical, folk, spirituals, and jazz.
He noted that Knoxville Choral Society provides an opportunity to sing a specific level of music and be part of a large civic chorus. Though separate organizations, the Knoxville Choral Society functions as the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s chorus, a draw for many of their singers. One of its core principles is “performance at the highest level possible for a large civic chorus.” You may have heard them at Handel’s Messiah, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or at the Clayton Family Holiday Concert this the past season.
The group also works with youth, including a Young Artists Concert, annual scholarships and collaborations with high schools to perform songs together to build a future community of civic chorus singers. Community is a shared theme that the society shares with the other groups.
The Knoxville Choral Society also features a fall and spring concert, including its 75th Anniversary concert April 24th at Central Bearden Church and on April 25th at Tellico Village Community Church. Both concerts will include the world premiere of Images of Knoxville by Assistant Director Andrew Duncan and his company in eight movements. Duncan said that “the aim of this whole piece is to provide a piece, a sense of what home is. This is a piece that touches on some of the beauty of the ordinary in our lives, and also the beauty of being in a community like this.”
Movements range from the opener about sunrise and a normal day of labor to every day experiences of sitting outside and taking in the environment. Duncan has worked in themes from traditional music like “Shady Grove,” a bluegrass song and a setting of “Wayfaring Stranger,” which is pretty well known. He said, “one of the most unusual movements of this whole program is called ‘Fireflies.’ So the orchestra will be mimicking kind of the activity that you would see and sort of the chaotic, but really beautiful.” The entire piece took around a year and a half to compose.
The 75th Anniversary concert will also feature Handel, Mozart and Holst. Tickets will be $15 and more information is available on its website. The Chamber Chorale’s final concert for the season will be May 7 at The Cathedral of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. The chamber concert is free, but reservations are required.
More Information: Website | Facebook | Instagram
Appalachian Equality Chorus
The Appalachian Equality Chorus started in 2012 with 12 members as the Knoxville Gay Men’s Chorus with “an intention to create a safe space for queer people.” Executive Director Bleu Copas explained its mission: “We use our voices, strengths and individual gifts to create enriching musical experiences, promote inclusion, equality and empathy toward minority populations and better our world through community partnerships.”
The group, now 160 members strong, is a full SATB choir and a 501(c) organization. Copas said that the group was passionate about “being true to the equality part of our name. So, we’ve expanded it to include voice types along the entire vocal ranges: sopranos, altos, tenors and basses.” As a result, they rebranded in 2022.
Members range in age from 18 to those in their 80s and join through a vocal placement process during which prospective singers sing a familiar tune. Members then run through scales to see where their voice best fits for tone and range. Copas said he is unaware of ever turning down a singer. The group has two seasons: Labor Day through the holidays and February through May or June. Members pay $100 per session (think: semester), offering scholarships if the fee is a barrier.
The group is conducted by Dr. Alan Stevens, Director of Choral Activities at East Tennessee State University, who was also Artistic Director for the chorus from 2015-2024. Dr. Stevens also leads a branch of the chorus in the Tri-Cities area. Many journey from Johnson City to Knoxville to rehearse and perform. Assistant Director is Dr. Lindsey Cope, who was leading the chorus on one of their Broadway tunes when I stopped by their rehearsal. Dr. Cope leads a smaller group called Choral Majority who sings at smaller venues and events when the entire chorus is too large.
The group rehearses every Monday during their semesters. Music ranges from standards through modern day. Community building, as with the other groups, is critical. Various social groups have formed, including knitters and Dungeons and Dragons players. Copas added, “we try to have a volunteer opportunity where we support either a local LGBT organization, maybe helping queer youth or homeless folks or a battered women’s shelter.”
Copas said that music also makes difficult topics easier to talk about and that the choir has helped strengthen family bonds. “Family members come in, they see their children or relatives or friends being brazenly honest and authentic… so families have overcome distances between the understanding of what it means to be queer.”
The group plays two concerts per year and supports Pride festivals in the region. The spring concert is typically organized around a theme, with this year’s being Broadway musicals. He explained that Dr. Stevens “does a really good job of weaving in our own personal stories. And so maybe it might be a song that you’re so familiar with, but when we put a different perspective on it or what that song like mean, or what it’s like to grow up queer in Appalachia, things like that.”
The holiday concert is typically held at the Bijou Theatre and at ETSU’s Martin Center for the Performing Arts each year. The venue for the spring concert varies with this year’s edition being at Clarence Brown Theatre on June 5th and 6th. It is titled Broadway Baby! and will include tunes from Phantom of the Opera, New York, New York and Wicked among others. I got treated to a preview of a couple songs at rehearsal, and it will be a great show. Tickets range from $15 to $60 and can be purchased here.
Other Choral Opportunities
As I’ve researched this article, I’ve found that like my article “Making Music in Knoxville“, I can’t be completely exhaustive. Many other groups exist, and if I didn’t include them, please add them in the comments.
Quickly, I want to mention a few other groups, including the O’Connor Senior Center’s Singing Seniors for members 50 years or older. I enjoyed seeing them perform at the 2025 Dogwood Arts Festival.
Singing Resistance Knoxville is a recently created group whose fact sheet states “We are a local grassroots movement of people working together to protect and care for our communities in the face of rising authoritarianism. A movement grounded in love, nonviolence and solidarity, we use song as a tool for nonviolent protest, community resilience and care.” The group meets at the Knox Resource Center to practice; check its LinkTree for more information.
I also reached out to Steve Horton about the Second Sunday Community Sing. He told me that Second Sunday “was formed in November of 2018 by a group of friends who felt that there was a need for harmony singing as a form of healing and community building in Knoxville. We meet on the Second Sunday of every month from 1:30-3:30 p.m. and feature songs of comfort and healing that lend themselves to group harmony singing rather than individual performance.
“Participants can lead a song or just join in. We started out at the Knoxville Visitors Center, working with the Chamber of Commerce. However, this year the Visitors Center is being remodeled so we have relocated to Fourth Presbyterian Church (1323 N Broadway, Knoxville, TN 37917) in the Fellowship Hall. We sing everything from old folksongs to favorite hymns to pop standards according to the interest of the group. The next meeting is on Sunday, May 10th, 1:30 p.m.”
If you miss joining your voices to sing with others, take a moment to investigate. Or if you just want to hear some good music, support these groups by attending their concerts.
Discover more from Inside of Knoxville
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.