Mission & History

While embracing a broad repertoire of choral music, The Heritage Signature Chorale is committed to preserving at the highest possible level the performance tradition of African-American music, especially the Negro Spiritual. The Chorale shall provide a venue for showcasing artists, composers, and arrangers who share this commitment, thereby fostering community awareness and appreciation of an important historical legacy. To this end, the Chorale shall maintain an education component that targets youth. This component may include, but shall not be limited to, mini-concerts, lectures, demonstrations, workshops, and musical dramas.

The chorale is proud to be a part of the dynamic choral community in the Nation’s Capital. Believing that live choral concerts have a unifying, rejuvenating, and enlightening effect on individuals and the community, HSC aims to make this happen with each season and in every performance.

Since its professional debut with the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra in May 2000, performing Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis & Chloe Suite No. 2, the chorale has become one of Washington’s premier choruses. Under the musical direction of its founder, Stanley J. Thurston, the chorale has won praise from critics and casual listeners alike for its “spectacular vocal polish” (Washington Post), vibrant delivery, and astute attention to technical nuance. Washington. D.C. arts critic Peter Fay commended the chorale’s “mastery of both the classical and gospel genres." Ysaye Barnwell of the perennial singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock hailed the chorale’s sold-old Annual Concert in June 2004 as “THRILLING … gut wrenching.”

Other concerts and engagements over the past five seasons have included the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ 20th Annual Open House Arts Festival; an African-American Composers Series tribute to Moses Hogan, in collaboration with the Duke Ellington School of the Arts Concert Choir; a performance with Denyce Graves at the 85th anniversary celebration of Zeta Phi Beta; A Concert for Peace, in which the chorale performed Randall Thompson’s powerful, unaccompanied classic The Peaceable Kingdom; three Master Performance Series concerts, featuring Rossini’s Stabat Mater and the music of conductor/arranger Nathan Carter, Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass and Bach’s Magnificat; the world premier performance of Ysaye Barnwell’s Suite Death, a symphonic work for choir and orchestra based on poems by Langston Hughes, at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center; the three-day Joy of Christmas concerts at the Washington National Cathedral, as guest of the Cathedral Choral Society; a featured performance in the Choral Arts Society of Washington’s Fourteenth Annual Choral Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Kennedy Center; La Creola and Le Code Noir with Opera Diaspora; the 2002 National Day of Prayer Commemoration in the East Wing of the White House; Bach and Gospel at the Corcoran Gallery of Art; and a collaborative performance with Bountiful Light at the 4th Annual Washington Jewish Music Festival.

Grammy-nominated composer/arranger Patrice Rushen presented the chorale’s first Composer’s Symposium in spring 2002. Barnwell, a singer, songwriter, and teacher, was the distinguished presenter for the chorale’s second Composer’s Symposium in 2003.

The chorale has released two CDs, Sing for Joy in 2004 and The Heritage Signature Chorale in 2002. It also recorded Hall Johnson’s arrangement of Elijah Rock for a CD that will accompany Chorus & Community, a textbook to be published by University of Illinois Press.