​While making the most of home continues to be central to our socially-distanced lives, so is our societal need to foster our inter-connectedness in the months ahead.  

Choral Chameleon's 'LUCKY THIRTEEN' Season features two new season-long musical series 'TASTE2' and 'WOVEN' to speak to both of these needs and to combine both physical and digital elements to ground the experience in the real world while our performances must be delivered digitally.

​Musical vignettes, recorded and mixed in the socially distanced environment of a recording studio in Brooklyn, will be released every month from October 2020 to May 2021 to subscribers via our page on Patreon, which is launching to the public on Monday October 12th 2020.

THE TASTE CURATORS, our non-musical collaborators for these two series, will inspire us, educate us and build lasting memories of a shared journey of the unknown across the coming months!

TASTE2 / Chef Lish Steiling 

• Artistic Director Vince Peterson is thrilled to be working again with chef Lish Steiling to create a new edition of our most-requested program for revival: 'TASTE', originally presented in 2014, which paired bespoke and complex 'bites' that evoked specific textures and flavors of the music.  
• In TASTE2 - the audience is the chef - each musical episode will pair with a single course.  Across the season, we're inviting our audience to prepare an entire meal designed by Lish and to consume it simultaneously with our musical vignettes.  
• Lish is an expert when it comes to creating recipes for TV, from the Today Show to Giada di Laurentiis, and is the perfect host to guide us through the creation and presentation of each course!

WOVEN / Trend Forecaster Abbey Cook

• Abbey is partnering with us for each vignette release to explore the elements of weaving: color, artisanship, pattern and texture.  
• Having travelled to over 50 countries scouting design inspiration for several fashion designers and companies, Abbey has also tapped into her global network to source a completely custom woven keepsake for this Season, which will be made by hand in Colombia for our qualifying patrons.

Click HERE to read bios of Lish Steiling and Abbey Cook.

We are sad to be saying goodbye to our beloved TEGAN MILLER, last Season's Assistant Conductor, who has made the decision to relocate from New York City to Savannah, Georgia with her husband.

This Season, to accommodate the complexities of managing virtual rehearsals and socially-distanced studio recording (we can't wait to share our plans with you!), we welcome TWO Assistant Conductors to work alongside Artistic Director Vince Peterson!

ALYSSA VENORA is Brooklyn-based choral and jazz soprano and a graduate of the Neag School of Education of The University of Connecticut. She currently holds an M.A. in Music Education and teaches elementary general music in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Alyssa is honored to be the Assistant Conductor of Choral Chameleon and delighted to work in collaboration with such fine musicians.

Composer/Conductor/Wearer-of-Many-Hats DEREK WEAGLE is a Brooklyn-based artist invested in the disruption of social and academic barriers around classical music, as well as the preservation of music-making as a joyful act of humanness. As Assistant Conductor with Choral Chameleon, he is privileged to work with so many amazing artists and collaborators and is excited to push the boundaries of what is possible in music. Derek holds a B.M. in Music Education from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and an M.M. in Composition with a minor in Choral Conducting from The New England Conservatory; he is currently pursuing a certificate in Sound Healing from the Sage Academic of Sound.

To mark the 10th Anniversary of the Choral Chameleon Summer Institute for composers and conductors, which had to be postponed due to Covid-19, we released 3 hour+ long roundtable interviews about the Institute experience, hosted by Artistic Director Vince Peterson.

This series offers unprecedented access to the life of the Institute, from the point of view of each of its key participants: students, singers and faculty, incorporating a selection of composers' draft scores and music clips.

With 3+ hours of viewing on offer, its officially a binge-watch moment!

Building from this Winter's feature story in Chorus America's magazine 'The Voice' on Composer-in-Residence programs (you can find it on our Press page), which featured an extensive interview with Artistic Director Vince Peterson, the conversation continued this month with an invitation to host a panel at this month's Chorus America virtual conference on 'Building Composer Partnerships'.

Vince was joined by composer Angélica Negrón, for whom we worked as a guest artist this season during her residency at New York Botanical Garden, and have commissioned, alongside three of our Composers-in-Residence: Rex Isenberg, Jeffrey Parola and Dale Trumbore.

The discussion centered around the benefits of being able to work with a choir over an extended period and, in this time of uncertainty, for the opportunity to work with living composers whose work can help a choir and its audience to maintain a dialogue with the present, through thoughtful use of texts.

The panel can be watched by all conference attendees until June 30th.