Mid-Columbia Mastersingers: Increasing opportunities for young singers a priority

The Mid-Columbia Mastersingers are proud to bring our love of music to our Tri-City neighbors, and as part of our mission to transform lives through the power of choral music, we are pleased to share information about research that confirms what we know: Participation in choir has numerous benefits for individuals and the entire community. In the coming year, a primary focus of our efforts will be to expand our youth choir program to introduce the benefits of communal singing to as many young people as possible.

Readers may be surprised to discover that singing in choir decreases levels of stress, anxiety and depression. For youth, the benefits are not only physical, but social and academic as well. Students who sing in choir outperform non-arts peers on the SATs and show a 20 percent increase in test scores in both language and math. Studying music helps improve spatial reasoning skills, which are necessary for success in advanced mathematics. Students who sing in choir are more empathetic towards their peers, community, and other cultures. By singing in choir, students learn to analyze problems, and to solve them in collaboration with colleagues to achieve a common goal. The result of their effort and commitment is a sense of pride, self-esteem, and self-confidence.

In 2018, we are launching an expansion of our youth choir program in an effort to reach more of the young people in our community who could benefit from choral singing. The Mid-Columbia Boys Choir for boys with unchanged voices in 4th-7th grade was launched in 2014. Now in its 4th season and consisting of 30 singers, the Boys Choir has performed throughout our community, most notably with the Mid-Columbia Ballet, the Mid-Columbia Symphony, the Mid-Columbia Youth Symphony, at Dust Devils games, at Martin Luther King, Jr. children's events, and many others.

The success of this program has propelled us to create more choral opportunities for youth, with a special focus on teenagers. In addition to the choir for 4th-7th grade boys with unchanged voices, we will start three new choirs: girls in grades 4-7, girls in grades 8-12, and boys in grades 8-12. We hope that this is just the beginning of a thriving youth choir program that will see benefits to hundreds of younger Tri-Citians.

This expansion comes with additional costs as we hire new directors, pianists, and administrative staff. Rotary groups support our efforts, and we hope to have success in grant and corporate sponsorship applications. As ever, our committed family of individual and business donors are our primary funding source, and we are always working to grow our circle of support.

In addition to funding, we face the challenge of location and transportation. Many youths cannot participate unless the choir is in their home district. Another challenge we are committed to is increasing the diversity of our programs, and we hope that providing opportunities nearer to culturally and economically diverse neighborhoods, and reaching out to young singers through their schools, will help foster inclusion. Columbia Basin College in Pasco has recently become a home for our rehearsals, and we hope this central location will help solve some of the transportation and diversity issues.

Expanding our youth choir program is an enormous step for our organization, and it incorporates our deeply held values of providing benefits to youth and reaching out to the community, laying the path for future sustainable community and choral singing as pillars of a healthy society and a better, brighter, bolder Tri-Cities.

This story was originally published April 2, 2018 at 2:04 PM with the headline "Mid-Columbia Mastersingers: Increasing opportunities for young singers a priority."