For the past 20 years, Luke McEndarfer has been the Artistic Director, President, and CEO of the National Children’s Chorus.

Under his leadership, the organization has become one of the fastest-growing and most successful youth arts organizations in the United States. It has performed at Royce Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles; the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; as well as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York.

The ensemble also won a 2022 Grammy for Best Choral Performance and released the album “Illumine” which was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios.

McEndarfer spoke to OperaWire about his accomplishments with the NCC, what he hopes for the future, and his greatest memories with the ensemble.

OperaWire: Tell me about these past 20 years with the NCC, and what do you feel? This seems like a long time but sometimes you don’t even realize.

Luke McEndarfer: I agree with you. I think that it both feels like a blink and at the same time, a lot has happened within the 20 years. The organization has come so far, literally, from an idea, a vision of what it could be into what it is today.

We still have visions for what it will be in the future, but just looking at the last 20 years, it’s been an unimaginable and extraordinary ride of a lifetime. I mean, from so many great moments that we never thought were even possible have happened for the organization, and so many pivotal moments along the way where everything could have fallen apart, including as recent as when the pandemic happened and threatened all performing arts organizations, especially choruses.

And we’ve grown a lot as a result of every challenge that we have faced. I say we, our collective team, but I’m very much a part of that. I’ve grown a lot. The experience of leading this organization over the last 20 years has shaped me more powerfully than any other life experience.

OW: Seeing children work and how they take in everything is eye-opening and life-changing. How have these past 20 years, or even just these past few years, helped you grow as a person?

LM: I was never formally trained to work with children. All my training was to work with adults.

But I learned early on that children have limitless potential, meaning that even when we set the bar high, and I always believed in doing that, they can do it. I always treated them like adults. I held them to certain standards and they had to follow certain rules.

At the same time, I held them to the same artistic standard that I was taught in working with adults, and what I found is that not only did they meet my expectations, but they exceeded them every time. So I’ve been in a constant state of lifting the bar higher and higher and the students continue to exceed expectations.

The latest result was our recent album with the London Symphony Orchestra. It was a dream many years in the making. We made a holiday album with a children’s chorus and it turned out to be so extraordinary and so beautiful. Even though it’s not the holidays anymore, when I sometimes put it on, I can’t believe it. I think, oh, my gosh, that’s us.

This is the result of all of our artistic efforts. So I think that in many ways, I’ve always said that the organization’s growth and my personal growth have always gone hand in hand.

I think that children are limitless and they really can do anything. I look back at students who came to me at one point wanting voice lessons, who couldn’t even access their head tone. Now some are getting their Master’s degree at Juilliard.

What that has taught me about myself is the limitless quality that exists in children, it exists in all of us. What we believe is what we become. What we envision is what we manifest. And so through the organization, it’s enlightened me in terms of what I’m able to do. Every time that the students exceed my expectations, it inspires me to exceed my own and to continue to climb and grow.

And there’s no plateau for our organization. We’re continually expanding and as soon as something great happens, we immediately are thinking, “what’s next? How are we going to expand upon that? How are we going to deepen the meaning? How are we going to increase the artistic impact? How are we going to create an even better experience for the students next time?”

It’s created a culture of striving for greatness with no endpoint and the endpoint is never perfection.

OW: I think one of the most interesting things about doing art, music, and performance is never losing that ability to enjoy the art and what you’re doing. How does the organization help children understand that this can be a lot of fun?

LM: It’s just in being greater, in continuing to become more extraordinary, in continuing to tap into more human meaning, especially when music can sometimes become a bit performative and somewhat robotic about just a musical execution. It’s really important to get back to the real reason why that composer wrote that music and also what the context of it is now as artists perform it. And how can we continue to bring forth more of the human experience, especially for children who are having their own life experiences?

And I think that’s up to the directors and the leaders. You must articulate that to them. At the National Children’s Chorus, we would never just begin a rehearsal and ask them to turn to page three.

We talk about the song and why it’s amazing. We will talk about who wrote it and why they wrote it. We will go into why the children are so excited to sing the piece and why every piece is so cool.

There’s never any sense of, we just learn the piece for the sake of learning it and that’s where the fun comes from. When you realize, for instance, that the harmonic texture is leading to a dissonance, you talk about it.

If you just have them sing it and don’t do anything, the students experience the uncomfortable feeling of the dissonance and that can sort of be off-putting to them. They can maybe even dislike that measure of music and say “I don’t like that.”

That is why we talk about it and take a look at the text. They can see how the dissonance and the harmony are bringing forth the meaning in the text and they find it awesome.

And now instead of thinking, there’s that scary part of the music they want to avoid, they see the beauty in it. The secret is not to shy away from it but to learn and understand its beauty, and then do the opposite. When we get to that bar, lean into the dissonance, especially if they are one of the singers that has the dissonant dyad, or triad.

OW: What would you like to see in the next few years as the program evolves?

LM: The first thing that’s very important, just from a practical point of view, is it’s very important to be in touch with what’s happening in society and the world. We have to look at what’s happening in our country, what’s happening in our chapter cities on a cultural level, and understand what our parents and our students are going through at a particular time because that shapes their wants and it shapes their needs.

For instance, during the pandemic, parents needed children to have as much programming as possible because they were in the house and they couldn’t leave during quarantine. That caused us to create additional programming because we felt they wanted and they needed that.

It was also very easy for students to attend sessions that were spread out throughout the week because they were always at home.

Now that we’re in a post-pandemic phase and in a phase where it’s not acute and life has resumed, we now have to listen to the new wants and needs of what parents and students need for the experience to be as great as it can for them. What we have been listening and hearing this particular year is that they want high impact and high value, but they want a very streamlined process that is not complicated to execute because their lives are already very complicated. For most people, what I’ve noticed is that post-pandemic life has gotten far more stressful.

It’s almost like we have a lot of the trauma from what happened during the pandemic, and now it’s mixed with everything going a million miles an hour. So our goal is going to be to reshape the program, to deliver that high musical impact, ensure that high level of education, but also make sure that what we offer what fits within the puzzle of their very demanding schedule. From a practical point of view, that’s what we’re moving toward.

OW: What types of steps are you taking to be able to do this?

LM: We’re looking at how our curriculum is arranged and making modifications to achieve that so that the members can have a streamlined and positive experience. Secondly, we’re looking at the model of programming as well. All of our programming stems from what’s going on right now. For example, this year we have entitled it “Thrive.”

It’s talking about music as an element of nourishment, a source of greatness in your life that you can depend on for mental, emotional, and physical well-being. We felt that was important this year, as students are reacquainting themselves to getting back to schooling and things like that. We have to remember it has been too long ago because it’s only been about a year and a half ago since many students chose to remain online because the pandemic was still flaring up all through the end of 2022.

So I feel this is the first full year that students are back without any of that going on. And so as students are reacquainting themselves, it’s been a priority that our organization help them cope through the use of music, with music as a therapeutic entity.

Looking ahead, we’re trying to find new ways to define what it means to sing in an ensemble. What music do we sing? How do we bring together the best of so many different genres?

It’s important to us that education is eclectic and that it also is in line with current trends of what’s going on, both in the classical music world and in pop culture.

OW: In this program, I imagine that there are children who are interested in Broadway as well as other types of music. I wonder how you are filling in everyone’s interests?

LM: You’re never going to, but we try to make sure that everybody’s enjoying themselves. I think students sometimes are attracted to different styles of singing. At NCC, we don’t teach style. What we teach is a solid singing technique, the Bel canto singing technique. We believe that when a student has a solid foundation and they know how to sing, meaning they know how to phonate beautifully in their head tone, they know how to use their mixed voice through the passaggio, and they know how to use chest voice properly with the head open to create a sound that’s beautiful, fluid and consistent throughout the entire range, then they can sing anything.

And so we tell them later, if you want to impose styles on knowing how to sing, there’s no problem with that. As long as you know how to sing well, you can learn style, but we always make a distinction.

Style is not technique. So they really do understand the distinction between style and technique. And when we’re focusing on technique, we’re focusing on consistency of strength throughout the entire range.

OW: Are there memories that you hold on to that you’ll never forget?

LM: Yes. There are so many of them. I could probably pick five but there are so many.

Some of the memories that come to mind immediately are my very first performance where in two months, I was told it was the Paulist Chorister at the time, not even the national children’s Chorus, you’re going to have to conduct all of Handel’s Messiah with Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra in Los Angeles. And that was just a monumental feat and it turned out beautifully.

Our transition into the National Children’s Chorus in 2009 was really scary because Paulist Chorister was a name that originated in 1904. So when I changed the name in 2008, I thought, this is going to go down as one of the greatest, boldest steps in the history of this organization or the thing that ruined it all.

There was the moment that we started this new National Children’s Chorus, and the building of Walt Disney Concert Hall had been completed, and I dreamed that we were going to perform there. And in March of 2016, we marched onto the stage and sang Tan Dunn’s Symphony 1997 with the American Youth Symphony presented by the LA Philharmonic. And it was just such a beautiful moment.

We later then sang at the Hollywood Bowl with Gustavo Dudamel, “Carmina Burana” with the name National Children’s Chorus up on the jumbotron. Three years later, we sang Mahler’s 8th Symphony and then won the Grammy Award for the performance. It’s an out-of-body experience.

And adding to that our most recent album, “Illumine” that we completed with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Every single one of those moments, I would have to say, have one thing in common. It’s very humbling.

And you would think it might be the opposite. Like, you do something great and you feel all pumped up. But I would have to say that when these moments happen, the opposite happens. You feel so humble because you can’t believe it’s true.

And so gratitude is the biggest takeaway of all of it because I know that many people in life work very hard and results don’t necessarily happen in the way that they have so consistently for us. So I think everyone on our team has a tremendous amount of gratitude for this journey, where the journey has taken us this many years.

OW: On your way to success, I’m sure that there have been ups and downs. What do you learn from these moments?

LM: You always have to push forward. People only see the success, and that’s mainly what I hear. If we go back to the pandemic, the National Children’s Chorus was an outlier. We expanded during the pandemic. 2020 was a record year for us, but that didn’t come easily.

We had to rethink as a team, how we were to pivot into an online educational program that’s good over Zoom and will be so good that people will not quit.

And that brought us the highest enrollment that we ever had. During that time, we specifically created content that we knew could be delivered over Zoom. We designed every class to go in an exact way that we felt was going to engage the students and make them feel seen and heard during the pandemic. We also rolled it out in a manner that was extremely organized and very focused, and focused specifically on the present moment, because the program could not bemoan the loss of our live performances of the past, and the program could not talk about the future because no one knew how long it was going to take.

All we had to do was focus on the present in every class. During that entire journey of the pandemic, even though now we can look back and say it was a success, it was terrifying.

I know there are some moments where you wonder or you question, maybe something could go wrong. Every decision you make will have its little impact. But my goodness, the pandemic, it threatened our very existence. It threatened everything we had worked for. No matter how cheerful all of the instructors and all of our staff were online, in making our presentation to the students, there was a deep sense of fear of what was going to happen. Those realities loomed daily for at least two years.

But I credit our team because we stuck together and we were very focused on the way that we were going to proceed with this and the way that we’re going to deliver the programming to the students.
And it worked.

Families were really happy, and students are really happy. We also did a record number of commissions during the pandemic. We commissioned composers from underrepresented voices from around the world, and we did the most world premieres we’ve ever done in our virtual choir music videos. Even though the students were separated, they were singing brand-new music. So we really dug deep creatively to deliver the most content that we could during that time.

And I do believe it’s our team’s commitment that is what caused our organization to actually not get smaller during the pandemic, but to expand and grow.