By GALA Expert
November 29, 2023
Several years ago Bill Loper, Artistic Director of Harmony: A Colorado Choral had a brainstorm. A few years earlier, the Rainbow Chorus, which had members in Northern Colorado and Wyoming, folded because of financial issues. “What if we offered Harmony to former Rainbow Chorus members”?
He created a proposal to travel to Fort Collins once a week to rehearse the same repertoire as Harmony. The season would include a retreat about 4 weeks before the concert to get everyone together to perform join concerts in both Denver and Ft. Collins.
The goals were:
- Provide an opportunity for persons in northern Colorado/Wyoming LGBTA communities to sing in a mixed GALA chorus;
- Increase Harmony’s exposure to that community at-large;
- Increase Harmony’s membership; and
- Perhaps help offset some of Harmony’s own financial issues.
With assistance from the church where we rehearse, various members, and directing a couple seasons “free gratis”, we have been able to stay afloat. We have between 12 and 20 singing members, and are now able to pay our assistant director to run weekly rehearsals, and to pay for a rehearsal accompanist. We now participate in Denver and Northern Colorado Pridefests, holding true to our mission to “embrace and inspire an inclusive community through song”.
The major benefit, however, has been the blending of the metro Denver and northern communities in the state to help our chorus live up to it’s name, “Harmony: a Colorado chorale”.