Masterworks Choral Ensemble

Website: MCE.org
Budget Size: 100 to 250K
Region: Southwest
County: Thurston
Artistic Focus Area: Music
Community Accelerator Grant Award: $12,500 in 2024
Primary Impact Category: The Future
Mission Statement: Masterworks Choral Ensemble is an adult community choir in Olympia, Washington, dedicated to performance, community service, music education, and leadership in the arts. Our mission is to perform a variety of choral, orchestral, and new commissioned works; to collaborate with other arts groups and local musicians; to participate in community outreach activities; and to provide leadership in developing, sponsoring, and broadening the vocal arts.

When ArtsFund sat down on Zoom with Masterworks Choral Ensemble’s (MCE) Artistic Director Ben Luedcke, Board President Roslyn Dailey, and Marketing & Development Chair Elise Marshall, they were just a few hours out from their first rehearsal of the season and brimming with enthusiastic energy. Although MCE was established in 1981, all three (and, in fact, most of the leadership team) are relatively new to the organization: Roslyn joined in 2018, Elise in 2022, and Ben in 2023. Of their 110 current members, approximately 40% have found their way to MCE over the last two years, a pandemic ramification which Roslyn says has been a silver lining to a difficult time: “It’s ended up reinvigorating things for us in some surprising ways.”

In practice, that reinvigoration has looked like a series of long and thoughtful conversations about the steps – large and small – that a volunteer-led choral group could take to more actively center diversity, equity, and inclusion in its music-making and community engagement. Over the last year, the group has made internal changes such as shifting their dress code for performances (MCE originally required tuxedos for men and skirts for women; now there is no gender-specific requirement), determining which vocal parts members sing by vocal range rather than gender and addressing the sections as sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses rather than “ladies” and “gentlemen,” and adapting its December concerts, moving beyond Christmas music to embrace broader themes of peace, light, and hope. Externally, the choir is working to expand its community by bringing in (and compensating) diverse musical collaborators and refining its audition criteria to rely less heavily on music literacy, which Ben notes is a skill more often taught in white and affluent school districts.

All these changes have been implemented in the interest of better and more authentically serving MCE’s community, but the team says the Community Accelerator Grant – the first grant their volunteer grant writer had ever tackled – has proved instrumental in helping frame their approach, naming the insight they have gained into their organization as the most positive thing about their experience. “This application prompted us to ask our members demographic questions, which was information we had never collected before,” says Elise. “As an example, we learned that nearly 30% of our members identify as LGBTQ+, and that’s a statistic we never would have known that has helped shape our focus for the coming season.” Roslyn adds, “In the past, we’ve made assumptions, sure, but this grant was our catalyst to seek out real information and think critically about how we could more fully support our group.” They are now building an annual demographic survey into their processes so they can gauge how their membership is changing over time.

Funding has been used to support board-wide Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training workshops, the choir’s first in 40+ years. “I think it’s important for us to educate ourselves,” says Ben. “When we say we value DEI, do we all know what that means? How can we do this work in a way that serves the Olympia community instead of just serving ourselves?” Funds are also going towards offering better wages to MCE’s longtime pianist and other musicians, renting rehearsal spaces, and – perhaps most significantly – advertising the choir’s outreach events. Starting last year under Ben’s leadership, MCE now kicks off every season with a series of free vocal workshops they call Open Sing, designed to demystify the audition process. Thanks in large part to the Community Accelerator Grant, they were able to get 120 attendees (approximately 85 of whom were completely new to MCE) through their doors this year, offer everybody refreshments, and, ultimately, welcome several new
members.

As they prepared to wrap up the call and kick off their season, Ben, Roslyn, and Elise took a moment to celebrate the community they have built and continue to build – one that is centered around the universal power of song, but also teaches its participants to value volunteerism and community service as integral components of making art. As Elise puts it, “I feel like my voice matters here – in more ways than one.”