Patterson Park chorus sees a boom in singers
On Tuesday nights, people file into Breath of God Lutheran Church, just a short jaunt east of Patterson Park. They are massage therapists, retired cancer researchers, tech workers and musical theater aficionados, some in their 20s and others decades older.
And for an hour and a half each week, they group themselves only by their singing preferences: sopranos and altos in the pews on the left, tenors and basses on the right.
“It brings you to this other place that’s kind of unexplainable,” Brian Wettstein, 57, said of the feeling he gets rehearsing with the Patterson Park Community Chorus, which has experienced a recent boom in membership.
“It felt like a little side hug before, but now it feels like a great big bear hug with all the people that are in the choir.”
When the Patterson Park Community Chorus was born in the fall of 2022,
it wove together only 29 voices. By the following spring the number had more than doubled, and today, over 100 people are in the mix.
It’s become so big that Heidi Ackerman, the chorus’ conductor, typically wears a microphone around her head that she refers to as her “Britney Spears mic.”
“Our community is hungry for musical outlets that challenge them, but also feed them,” she said. “It’s also so fun to watch them blossom into this wonderful, vibrant community that is very invested in — not only in just the chorus, but in each other.”
Part of the Patterson Park Academy of Music’s programming, the chorus has concerts May 19 and 20 at Ministry of Brewing. On Tuesday, the singers will experiment for the first time with something new: a “one night choir” event, during which they’ll briefly perform before attendees join them in learning a new song.
“We just want to see a musical renaissance in this part of the city,” said Joshua Espinoza, 35, a pianist who co-founded the Patterson Park Academy of Music with his husband, Erik Franklin.
Together, they opened the doors to the Upper Fells Point music school at the start of 2021, on the third floor of the Julie Community Center.
Now serving as its co-directors, Espinoza runs his own studio and teaches jazz piano as an adjunct faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute and Franklin is a composer who plays clarinet in a chamber music ensemble. This month, they opened the South Baltimore Music Academy, a sister insti
tution to the Patterson Park Academy of Music, in Federal Hill.
Franklin and Ackerman met in the military, where they both performed in the United States Army Field Band, a musical touring organization formed in 1946. Ackerman was an alto in the Soldiers’ Chorus and also served as its enlisted conductor. Both left the Army in 2020, and a few years later, discussions began about starting a community chorus housed within the Patterson Park Academy of Music.
“Singing has enriched my life in so many ways, and I have refocused my energy from conducting professional ensembles to community choruses because there is a level of raw and authentic drive to sing well and to serve a greater good and to come together,” Ackerman said.
She has performed as a soloist at Carnegie Hall with the New York Pops and at the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra; is the musical director of the Frederick Chorale; and serves as an assistant conductor for the Baltimore Choral Arts Society.
Any adult is welcome to join the Patterson Park Community Chorus, sans audition; many live in the surrounding neighborhoods. It’s made up of people young and old, those who have sung consistently over the years and others who haven’t.
“I was seeking a choir that doesn’t audition and that has intergenerational, multigenerational ages, because that’s important to me to foster community,” said Ally Waldon, an alto singer who found that in the Deer Creek Chorale before joining the chorus closer to her home in Hamilton in the fall.
Waldon, 37, works for an independent book wholesaler and is a lifelong choir singer. In the chorus, “you don’t need to have all that much in common to make a friend,” she said, adding that more experienced singers help those in need of pointers.
It was through the chorus that Leah Simonson, a 28-year-old social worker, and Kelowna Ostwald, a 27-year-old working in health care administration, struck up a friendship.
“It’s a bunch of people that I might not meet otherwise, but are so welcoming,” Ostwald said.
Both live in Upper Fells Point and joined last year with prior singing experience, though Simonson said she doesn’t read music, and instead listens to recordings Ackerman makes of herself singing each part of every song.
This season, Ackerman’s picks include “Unclouded Day,” arranged by Shawn Kirchner, and “Goodnight Moon,” an Eric Whitacre musical rendition of the beloved children’s book.
Singers pay dues each season — the chorus runs three sessions spanning the year — which Ackerman said helps cover the cost of music and an accompanying pianist.
“We knew it was going to be popular, but we didn’t know just how popular this program would be,” Espinoza said.
A large part of its success, singers said, is thanks to Ackerman, whose jokes spurred warm laughter from the chorus on a recent Tuesday night.
“Everybody is better than they thought they were, and she brings that out,” tenor singer Greg Finch, 67, said. “To be able to be part of making something beautiful that you can’t do by yourself is remarkable.”
Like a number of others, he joined the Patterson Park Community Chorus at its inception in 2022, after a Peabody chorus for adults in Baltimore came to an end.
Other singing groups in the area include the auditioned Peabody Hopkins Conservatory Choir, The Baltimore Men’s Chorus, which bills itself as the state’s longest-running LGBTQ+ performing arts organization, the Maryland State Boychoir and the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, which hosts auditions.
At the Patterson Park Community Chorus, Finch leads a group that organizes social outings for members, from visiting the kite festival in Patterson Park to singing karaoke.
“You’re new for about 12 seconds,” he said.
Wettstein, who compared being in the chorus to a big hug, works as a massage therapist, yoga instructor and personal trainer, and leads a brief yoga session in the church gymnasium before rehearsals.
A tenor singer who lives next to Patterson Park, he became a member in 2022 after having previously looked for a local caroling group he could join, without any success.
“I really can’t believe it’s dropped in my neighborhood and given me this hour and a half or more of joy every single week,” he said.
Kathy Helzlsouer, a retired oncologist who worked at the National Cancer Institute and is an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has loved to sing since she joined her high school chorus in a suburb of Pittsburgh.
Now in her 60s, she said the Patterson Park Community Chorus rehearsals are a time when she’s focused on the music in front of her.
“All the other cares and woes of the day just disappear.”