The Heinz Chapel Choir’s EngagePitt campaign to fund our international tour to England & Scotland comes to a close on December 31. Your generosity has been extraordinary and we’re all truly humbled by your support.

The campaign’s purpose was to make the tour financially possible for the choir members, and reaching our initial goal of $10,000 allowed us to complete the funding for a Tour Scholarship for each singer. But your gifts continued and now you’ve more than doubled that amount! Those additional funds will be directly applied to the singers’ final tour payment, making the trip even more affordable for all of them.

When we set out on this journey, we never could have imagined how much we would learn about our extended Heinz Chapel Choir family – it’s been wonderful to hear from HCC alums, families and friends of the singers, and supporters from far and near. We can’t wait to return to campus next week to roll up our sleeves, write you some thank you notes, and get back to rehearsing!

Please check in with us at our website (pitt.edu/~heinzcc), facebook and instagram pages for updates as we count down to our May departure. We hope to see you at our spring concert in Heinz Chapel or our Tour Farewell Concert (or both)! We’ll be sending you postcards from "merry old England" and hope you’ll come along with us by reading our Tour Blog posts.

But for now - best wishes for a healthy and happy 2017 filled with song!

The Members of the Heinz Chapel Choir & Susan Rice, Director

It's been such a pleasure to sing the first 3 performances of our Holiday Concert Series in the Heinz Memorial Chapel during the past week! It gives us great joy to share this music with you, to bring these pieces to life together with one another, and to stand in the midst of such beauty while doing so. 

It's overwhelming to realize that it was just 5 days ago that we thanked you for helping us reach our initial goal of $10,000, which completed funding the students' tour scholarships - and now we're writing again to thank you for helping us raise an additional $5,000 to lower each student's tour payment by $100! 

With 25 days and 3 concerts remaining in our campaign, we're setting a new total goal of $20,000, which will allow us to continue decreasing each student's personal contribution to the cost of our tour to England and Scotland.

We're so grateful for your generosity and your support of our desire to share HCC's music abroad, to learn and grow in our own music-making, and to bring a deeper understanding of British music and culture back home with us. Thank you for helping us make this dream a reality. 

Susan Rice and the members of the Heinz Chapel Choir

We're incredibly grateful for your generosity and astonished to have reached our $10,000 goal on Day 29 of our campaign! These funds, together with our holiday concert ticket sales from 2014-2016, provide a Tour Scholarship for each of the 51 singers traveling to England and Scotland. But each student will also make a significant personal contribution to the cost of tour expenses, and setting aside those resources can be a hardship.

We have 32 days (and 6 concerts!) remaining before our campaign comes to a close on December 31. Inspired by your incredible response, we're increasing our goal to $15,000, which will allow us to subtract $100 from each singer's personal contribution.

We hope to have the opportunity to sing for you in the coming weeks in the Heinz Memorial Chapel, a special place to be together and make music, particularly at this time of year. If you are far from Pittsburgh, please look for the link to the WQED broadcast and livestream of our December 9 performance at www.music.pitt.edu

Thank you, again, for helping to make this tour (and everything that we'll learn from it) a possibility. We appreciate every one of you so much.

Sincerely,

Dr. Susan Rice

Director, Heinz Chapel Choir

“Singing in the Heinz Chapel Choir has allowed me to relax and express myself in a different way than I normally do. Most of what I do at Pitt is structured toward academics, and singing in the choir has allowed me to go outside of that academic realm and be able to meet new people that I otherwise wouldn’t have met if I would’ve just stayed with my academics the entire time.”

-Nate Reinert, '18, Tenor

Tenor II section leader / Personnel Manager, 2016-17

Sopranos Gracie Dunn (pictured right), a sophomore, and Sophie Shah (left), a freshman, on being members of the Heinz Chapel Choir:

Gracie: “I love going to rehearsal during the week. I just love being immersed in music when I’m stressed about classes. I can forget about that and spend time with people who are awesome musicians.”

Sophie: “I would say, first and foremost, I’m just really grateful to be in HCC in my first year at Pitt. The people I’ve met in Heinz Chapel Choir and the music we’ve started singing are just all so incredible. I definitely think I’m learning a lot.”

We're thrilled to see that the EngagePitt campaign for the Heinz Chapel Choir's international tour to England & Scotland is already at 33% of our $10,000 goal! According to Google maps, that puts us somewhere over Newfoundland! We're so grateful for your generosity and support.

We're hard at work preparing for our Holiday Concert Series and look forward to moving rehearsals to the Chapel this week! We hope to see you at one of the performances (ticket information here), but if you're far from Pittsburgh, we hope you'll join us for the live broadcast and webstream of our performance on Friday, December 9 (a link will be posted here by the 9th), brought to you by WQED.

Meanwhile, we thought you'd enjoy meeting a few of the current members of HCC. We'll post member profiles here on our Updates page, but if you'd like to meet more of the singers, please find us on Facebook and Instagram (@heinzchapelchoir), where you'll find additional profiles.

They're a dynamic group of humans (pardon the pun) and it's my great pleasure to make music with them.

Best regards,

Susan