The virtual choir project for 10 year anniversary is born

Hi, I’m Keith McCauley, the director of The Hope Project. Cantus has had an amazing impact on my life, and the lives of the Cantus directors. We’re surprised that we’re approaching 10 years of Cantus Youth Choirs. We’re not surprised that it’s survived … I think we’re surprised that it’s already been 10 years! Time really does fly when you’re having fun.

I can’t even describe how excited we are about The Hope Project concept. About half a year ago, we were kicking around ideas on how we could make year 10 just a little bit more exciting. Every year seems to get better than the previous one, but the 10 year mark is a great time to look back and celebrate on progress.

After debating a number of ideas we all kind of settled into this concept of a virtual choir. Eric Whitacre has been doing them for years, and they’re these amazing community-building projects that bring strangers together that share a love for Eric’s compositions.

Our virtual choir project won’t be bringing strangers together … instead, it’ll be a reunion of friends over time and space to celebrate the ideas that make Cantus special: music brings people together. Music gives us hope. And working with youth gives us hope for the future.

And that’s when we knew it had to be Hope Will Lead Us On.

Hope Will Lead Us On was performed as the mass number at our Finale 2015 concert. It was our headline piece at our concert dedicated to children with special needs.

We’ll bring together talented instrumentalists: piano, guitar, bass, drums, and strings. We’ll bring together soloists … adult musicians we’ve featured in the past that are dear and special to the Cantus community. And lastly, but most importantly, we’ll bring together the choir. YOU, are the choir!

We’ve launched The Hope Project page where you can easily submit a video of you singing your part. We’ll take your audio and layer it with the hundreds of submissions we’ll receive to create a powerful, digital choir of Cantus singers. We’ll take your video and roll it into the music video. There is no way you’re going to want to miss this!