ALEXANDREA TOMBRAKOS WEISS
Michael McCormick conducts Ars Musica Chorale, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.
Ars Musica Chorale will wrap its 60th anniversary season with top-tier choral music of joyous moods and symbolic significance. The final concert of the season, May 30 at West Side Presbyterian Church in Ridgewood, will pair Francis Poulenc’s Gloria, a sacred choral masterwork, with André Thomas’ Mass: A Celebration of Love and Joy, a lesser known, modern gospel mass.
The works were written 60 years apart — Poulenc’s in 1959 and Thomas’ in 2019 — reflecting the same amount of time that the Ridgewood-based community choir has existed.
ALEXANDREA TOMBRAKOS WEISS
MICHAEL McCORMICK
Music director Michael McCormick — who will conduct the choir alongside guest vocalists and The Adelphi Orchestra — created the program to show how both the choral canon and the organization have evolved over six decades.
Programming began with Thomas’ Mass, which draws on old traditions with a mix of gospel, spirituals, jazz and 20th century western classical music. Thomas found inspiration in Poulenc’s Gloria and said that it makes the perfect companion piece. As a child, he heard Poulenc’s organ works and it left a lasting impression on his compositional style.
Thomas was also inspired by Robert Ray’s Gospel Mass, a modern mass in the gospel style that has become the gold standard of the choral repertoire. Thomas attended its premiere at the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1979 while pursuing a degree and assisting the Black Student Chorus, which Ray founded and directed.
McCormick says that Ray’s Mass is well known to people in the choral world, but Thomas’ is not because it is relatively new. “The work is completely unfamiliar to everyone in Ars Musica, which was the goal,” he says, explaining that the singers get to experience the artistic challenges of a new musical language and text setting.
The five-movement work was originally written as standalone pieces, starting with the Gloria section in 2014, followed by the Credo, Sanctus, Kyrie and the Agnus Dei. True to the gospel style, Biblical texts in English were added to the traditional Latin texts.
SILKY CARTER
The concert’s soloists, soprano Silky Carter and tenor George Johnson III, both live in Northern New Jersey and are graduates of Westminster Choir College in Princeton. McCormick and his wife are Westminster alumni, too (he earned a bachelor’s degree in music education), and live in Princeton.
Since graduating, Carter has been teaching music in Irvington, and performs regionally as a soloist. This spring, McCormick heard her sing in a workshop on singing gospel music at an American Choral Directors Association conference in Providence, Rhode Island.
McCormick previously heard Johnson perform the tenor solo in the Thomas piece with the Westminster Jubilee Singers. He was blown away by Johnson’s artistry and voice, and knew he had to bring him aboard. Johnson made his Ars Musica premiere as the tortured swan in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana choral blockbuster that opened its season in November.
“George and Silky have the exact right tone and sound for the piece, and they have such freedom in both of their voices in being able to express what Thomas’ goals are with it,” says McCormick. “There is a huge amount of joy and love that comes out of it, even just in the way that it is composed.”
Though the Thomas and Poulenc works have vastly different soundscapes, they have similar, joyous moods. “The whole point of a ‘Gloria’ is the glorification and the praise of God, and that’s what the text is about,” says McCormick. The hymn of praise is traditionally sung in the Latin Mass after the Kyrie, on festive occasions.
Although Poulenc’s style became more restrained in his later years, particularly in his sacred works, much of his Gloria is playful and even theatrical. The six movements span from serious to lighthearted, from mystical to spirited. “There are two movements, the second and the fourth, that are particularly jovial,” McCormick says. “Actually, when the piece premiered, there was some criticism about those two feeling out of place compared to the first, third and fifth. Those are a bit more intense, and some of them are much more chromatic and somber.”
The Gloria is one of the most frequently performed pieces Poulenc composed for the choral-orchestral repertory. “It is a good, familiar piece for us,” says McCormick. “It is popular and also fits well with what Thomas has to offer in his piece.” They have performed it within the last 15 years, and also sang it informally at their 2025 Summer Sing program, a casual, non-auditioned session in which singers perform a major choral work together.
JUSTIN JAJALLA
CAITLYN HUETZ
Soprano Caitlyn Huetz from Maplewood will sing the solo. She is one of the choir’s choral scholars — a paid position that gives late-college and early career singers from Central and North New Jersey professional experience as ensemble leaders and soloists. Of the choir’s 68 active members, there are four.
Huetz also soloed at the Rutter Requiem concert in March. She and McCormick met at Rutgers University; he was pursuing an advanced degree in choral conducting and she was an undergrad in vocal performance. “Her voice is ideal for the sound that I absolutely love for the soloist in this work, which is incredibly clear and sensitive,” he says. “On top of that, she has a beautiful tone with perfect intonation.”
This concert is unique in that the works, often large and sprawling, will be presented in versions scored for a chamber orchestra. Approximately 20 musicians from Adelphi will accompany.
Adelphi is a professional Bergen County-based chamber orchestra, founded in 1953, and has partnered with Ars Musica for more than a decade, appearing at one or two concerts every season. They last collaborated on the Carmina concert, which was similarly presented in a reduced, chamber version; the performance marked its North American premiere.
“They’re so professional,” McCormick says. “All the musicians are responsive, flexible and incredibly experienced, which brings a deeper wealth of knowledge to all the performances.”
Ars Musica was founded in 1965 in Paramus, with 40 members, as The Paramus Chorale. Its first concert had an all-Baroque program, and for the first decade, Keshner stuck mostly to the genre, programming motets, oratorios, masses and madrigals. The Early Music repertoire is peaceable and pleasant, but Keshner was a groundbreaker. At the time there were only a handful of female conductors in the United States.
“Her mentors that she was studying with in New York told her, ‘If you want conducting opportunities as a woman, you have to create them yourself,’ and she did exactly that,” says McCormick.
The group incorporated as Ars Musica Chorale in 1973; since the 1980s, it has performed four concerts per season. (Keshner stepped down in 1985.) All positions are auditioned. Choral scholars aside, “it is largely volunteers and unpaid singers, so the majority are there for the love of singing,” says McCormick.
NICOLE CARR
MICHAEL McCORMICK
Around 55 members sing at each performance. McCormick describes their artistic goal as “well balanced, flexible and agile singing, and very clear tone and intonation. We are large enough to not be a chamber choir, but small enough to have the flexibility that, say, a 110-person chorus doesn’t have. We are a good size to be able to do things like a Bach motet but to also do masterworks like the Poulenc Gloria.”
Programming leans towards masterworks and choral-orchestral music. “We tend to do fancy masterworks more so than programmatic concerts, but we do both,” McCormick says.
The organization’s annual holiday concert in December honored its roots, as well as where it is now. All the past music directors were invited back; those who couldn’t attend shared video messages projected on a large screen. Among those in person were McCormick’s predecessor, Brian Mummert, and Keshner, aged 98, who conducted the choir in the famous “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah. “We were very lucky to have her there and got to hear some of her wisdoms of years past,” McCormick says.
McCormick came aboard during the 2021-22 season. In addition to his work with Ars Musica, he is the choral specialist and associate director of choral activities at Princeton University, and music director and organist at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Basking Ridge.
He first became interested in the world of community and avocational choirs, especially larger ones, in high school. He was raised in Onieda, New York, and his music teachers taught at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, so naturally he joined the school’s Masterwork Chorale, an auditioned choir. “It is what they call a ‘town and gown’ choir, so you had community members as well as students and faculty members singing in the group,” he says. “That was what really got me interested more deeply in choral music.”
He continued to perform as a chorister and a tenor soloist at various choirs. “My end goal was to be able to artistically lead an organization like (Masterwork Chorale),” he says. “I knew that Ars Musica had a very healthy and long history, which was very attractive for me. I applied and, through a shot in the dark, I was lucky that it happened to work out!”
Past music directors have left their imprint on the choir. McCormick is still shaping his own, but is setting the bar high with innovative and collaborative concerts that show off the choir’s excellence and creativity. The Carmina concert was one of his proudest moments with the organization. In addition to Adelphi, it featured two New Jersey children’s choirs: Mount Olive Middle School Select Choir and New Jersey Children’s Choir of the Korean School in Tenafly.
“It was an absolute milestone for the organization to get to collaborate with so many people,” he says. “We actually had to turn people away at the door. Our chorus administrator was walking up and down the aisles, trying to find a single spare seat in a pew for one person to go into — it was that full. It felt amazing to bring that to the community.”
For more on Ars Musica Chorale, visit arsmusica.org.
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