Our Mission
The North Fork Community Choir is a non-profit, non-auditioned choir building community in the North Fork Valley and surrounding area by inspiring educational rehearsals and high-quality performances for diverse singers and audiences
Our Vision
The North Fork Community Choir strives to create a lasting musical community where everyone feels welcome, included, and valued.
History
The our community choir began when Dale Soucek recruited an informal group of local singers to perform Handel’s Messiah in the early 2000s. For the next decade, the group performed the Messiah every other year, alternating with concerts of other music, including Christmas octavos and Amal and the Night Visitors. When Dale’s health began to deteriorate in 2009, other local choral directors such as Gretchen Nicholoff and Jan Tuin stepped in to conduct the holiday concerts for a few years, but the choir ultimately became dormant shortly before Dale’s death in 2013.
In February of 2015, Gretchen Nicholoff and Stephanie Helleckson independently approached the Blue Sage Center for the Arts within the same week about the possibility of housing a community choir under the Blue Sage Center for the Arts. Rehearsals began a few months later, and in September of 2015, the choir performed its first concert as the North Fork Community Chorus under the direction of Stephanie Helleckson.
Two years later, Stephanie left the area to pursue graduate education, and the Blue Sage hired Dylan Fixmer as the new director. As a composer, Dylan brought a new perspective to the choir, and during his two-year tenure took the skill level and professionalism of the choir to new heights.
In a serendipitous turn of events, Stephanie returned to the valley in fall of 2019, just as Dylan was moving on to pursue his compositional dreams as composer-in-residence at UNC in late 2019. She resumed direction over the choir for the spring 2020 concert, but the Covid-19 pandemic prevented a public performance. Instead, the choir produced its first virtual choir recording.
Over the next year, the choir continued to find creative ways to sing and perform, from a cappella chamber groups to outdoor concerts to virtual caroling. In December 2021, they performed the Messiah for the first time in over a decade as their first indoor, in-person concert in over two years.
The pandemic also took a toll on the Blue Sage Center for the Arts, which rearranged its structure and priorities in light of the financial hardships of the pandemic. This restructuring ultimately led to the North Fork Community Choir becoming its own independent organization in Spring 2022. In January of 2023, the new NFCC filed as its own 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
The North Fork Community Choir currently performs two major concerts annually in November and April/May with a lighter, drop-in Summer Sing for select performances at local events during the summer months and holiday caroling on December 23. Every year and a half we perform a major work, with the two intermediary concerts consisting of shorter octavo-type pieces. We continue to monitor Covid-19 and other infectious diseases within our community and adjust our rehearsals and concerts as needed. We are non-auditioned and actively welcome new participants with a wide range of singing backgrounds at the beginning of each concert season. Come sing with us!