The Crossing

Updated
1 Dec 2016

crossing-aniara-2017-01-web.jpg

The Crossing performs Ted Hearne's Sound from the Bench at National Sawdust. Photo by Jill Steinberg.

crossing-seven-responses-2014-01.jpg

The Crossing performs John Luther Adams' Canticles of the Holy Wind at the Crane Arts Center Icebox. Photo by Rebecca Oehlers.

crossing-aniara-2017-02-web.jpg

The Crossing's Seven Responses at Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedaral. Photo by Chip Colson.

Winner of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence and two ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, The Crossing is a 24-member professional chamber choir dedicated to expanding the contemporary choral music experience through commissions, collaborations, and performances. Conducted by Donald Nally, The Crossing has presented over 60 world premieres and has appeared at such venues and festivals as the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, Spoleto Festival in Italy, Carnegie Hall, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Center-supported projects include The Gulf (between you and me), which presented choral compositions by experimental composers Gene Coleman, Chris Jonas, and Gabriel Jackson; and Seven Responses, which commissioned seven contemporary compositions responding to 17th-century composer Dieterich Buxtehude’s historic cantatas. In 2017, The Crossing received a Center grant to present Aniara, a hybrid choral-theater work, composed by Guggenheim and Pew Fellow Robert Maggio and created in collaboration with Finnish theater company Klockriketeatern. In 2020, The Crossing received a Center Project grant for Farming, a choral work that will confront ways in which modern farming and food production shape the environment, communities, and essential workers in live performances staged among the crops of a Bucks County farm.