The Crossing

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The Crossing is a GRAMMY-winning professional chamber choir in Philadelphia conducted by Donald Nally

10/12/2026

Haikus for Season 22:

as autumn deepens
gathering to celebrate
living in song

*sometimes i worry*
storytelling through music
describing our lives

borderless crossing
inviting our limitless
imagination

Join us in just two weeks for an evening of poetic forms – mesostics, erasures – inspiring composers Joshua Stamper and Nicholas Cline to find new ways of saying things through voices, through our voices, through The Crossing.

Music that addresses the elements:
the randomness of the wind,
the fragility of the sea,
the beauty all around us.

Sunday, October 25 @ 5pm
preconcert talk @ 4pm
The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia

Nicholas Cline, The Sea Came Up and Drowned

(East Coast premiere) based on poetry of Rachel Webster

Joshua Stamper, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion

(revised from our 2018 premiere) featuring John Grecia and Lee Hagon on vintage keyboards

Our season artwork is by Rocco Lombardi

09/11/2026

Check out a review of our Gabriel Jackson album “Rigwreck” in October’s issue of the Choral Journal from ACDA !

“In performances of such daunting complexity, it is easy to admire the achievement. What makes this recording exceptional is that one is moved by it as well. Jackson’s music, brought vividly to life by Nally and The Crossing, reveals new layers with each encounter, rewarding repeated listening without ever surrendering all its secrets. The result is a recording of rare beauty, emotional depth, and artistic conviction that confronts some of the most urgent human and environmental questions of our time.”

PARMA Recordings

09/01/2026

We are saddened by the death of Wendell Berry, and yet strengthened by his words addressing our inevitable return to the Earth, as set by Gavin Bryars in A Native Hill:

“Days, winds, seasons pass over me as I sink under the leaves. For a time only sight is left me, a passive awareness of the sky overhead, birds crossing, the mazed interreaching of the treetops, the leaves falling - and then that, too, sinks away. It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace.”

Berry’s words in the final movement of A Native Hill - “At Peace.”
Watercolor animation by Will Kim

07/13/2026

The Crossing @ The Rodin Garden Bar
Friday Night, July 17, bar open 4-8.30pm
w/ 25-minute performance at 6.30pm
**free admisssion, registration required**

I invent nothing, I rediscover.
– Auguste Rodin

We’ll be rediscovering at The Rodin this Friday night, as Philadelphia Museum of Art presents us outside in the Rodin Garden Bar.

We’re excited to make our first appearance at The Rodin Museum. Outside. Lots of art- (and cocktail-) lovers. The Crossing.

This show is short and powerful, with music of Shara Nova, Ayanna Woods, Kile Smith, David Lang, and Caroline Shaw.

Come rediscover: first, the music; then, each other.

But today, mankind believes itself able to do without Art. It does not wish to meditate, to contemplate, to dream; it wishes to enjoy physically. The heights and the depths of truth are indifferent to it; it is content to satisfy its bodily appetites. Mankind to-day is brutish — it is not the stuff of which artists are made.
— Auguste Rodin, in “Art” (1912)

07/10/2026

Democracy, Six (and 250) Years Later
a conversation with composer Robert Maggio
by The Crossing 2026 summer associate Matthew Brown

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy” — Rob’s piece, which we sang on MoM2 this June, sets a 1940 fireside chat by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the lead up to the concert, and in the spirit of America250 observations, our summer associate Matthew sat down with Rob to learn more about the work’s beginnings, a composer’s perspective after six years, and The Crossing’s journalistic approach to storytelling.

Read more at the link in our bio

🎥: Four/Ten Media
🎤: Paul Vazquez

Premiered on film October 30, 2020 as a part of The Crossing Votes

06/30/2026

2026-2027 Season // Sometimes I Worry

Sometimes?

Anxiety is like an imaginary friend;
a giant pink rabbit of disquiet,
asking,
“What do we do?”
“What can we do?”

We shout into the wind,
we crack our cheeks,
yet the wind is silent.

So, we turn to each other,
we breathe:
we are journalistic artists in a tradition of reporting that predates even Homer and his Aeolian Island.

We breathe again.
We use our own wind to bring a Season of singing:
of rising seas, of gatekeepers, of a freezing child on indifferent streets, of sheep and shepherds, of The Other,of the sacrifices of friends and strangers and the Earth, of love, and of death.

And, we worry.
We sing about worry.
Because making sense of things through art, and connecting with our ever-broadening community,
are our priorities; right up there with breathing and listening.

Explore our 2026-2027 Season: Sometimes I Worry.
Then, join us for over twenty concerts, three album releases, a museum exhibition, new and trusted collaborators and composers: touring, singing, recording, listening, breathing, hoping.

If we admit it, maybe we can change it.

Season art by Rocco Lombardi Rocco Lombardi

SEASON FIRSTS
concerts at Rothko Chapel
a film/installation project with Suzanne Bocanegra
poor hymnal, fully staged
collaborations with JACK Quartet and Bang on a Can All-Stars Bang on a Can All-Stars
world premieres of Gavin Bryars, ayanna woods, Shara Nova, Hildur Guðnadóttir
US premiere of Kareem Roustom
music of JACOB MÜHLRAD and Nathaniel Wolfgang Parks

SEASON REPRISES
Sin-Eater of David T. Little
the little match girl passion of davidlangmusic
‘mid the steep sky’s commotion of Joshua Stamper
a return to The Fabric Workshop and Museum, University of Richmond, UNC Chapel Hill, and Shadyside Presbyterian in Pittsburgh
music of Nicholas Cline, Gabriela Ortiz

06/27/2026

We are loving Nathalie Joachim’s new piece “Virtues” written for us and the amazing Tommy Mesa, Cellist — premiering this weekend at MoM2

Nathalie’s piece sets Benjamin Franklin’s “13 Virtues” and was commissioned for us and Tommy by ArtPhilly and Shawn Felton

06/22/2026

The Month of Moderns 2 — June 27 & 28 in Philadelphia, presented by ArtPhilly

The People Speak from the Birthplace of America
A final nod in our Season referencing the Declaration
asking questions about people, speech, birthplace, and America

Fast forward to now.
We present a program of creators, who, like the founders, pen things. They take words, rearrange them, trying to get at fundamental truths. They compose music that tells us things about our world we didn’t know, or didn’t know we knew.

Digging still deeper into our catalogue of commissions, we find the extraordinary community of Philadelphians, writing new works in this Place of the Declaration and sending out musical messages to the far corners of the globe. Composers Jennifer Higdon, Kile Smith, Robert Maggio, Julia Wolfe, James Primosch, and Benjamin C.S. Boyle cover the stylistic landscape and explore everything from FDR’s vision of Democracy, to the disappearance of bluestem grasses, to love, and to jazz.

Featuring the world premiere of
Nathalie Joachim’s Virtues
w/ Tommy Mesa, Cellist, cello

Saturday, June 27 @ 5pm | Broad Street Love
Sunday, June 28 @ 5pm | The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
preconcert talk @ 4pm (both dates)

06/19/2026

OUT NOW: Aaron Helgeson’s The Book of Never on Navona Records

Today, we release our 41st album as we observe Juneteenth – a day that reminds us we must stand up to and end oppression.

This is music that carefully examines histories of oppressions of culture; specifically, the strange world of Novgorod, in the land of modern Ukraine.

While we just celebrated A Hundred Years On at The Highmark Mann Center, we now turn to a Thousand-Year-Old Story, as related to us in the Novgorod Codex. History repeating, and repeating.

Mirroring the layers upon layers of writing in the Codex, Aaron weaves together fragments:
desperate attempts of a monk to preserve the culture of a community strangled by authoritarian rulers, words of defiant authors and artists from across eras – Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, Angela Davis, Gertrude Stein, Thanhhà Lại, Holocaust survivor André Singer, The Rolling Stones –
fragments of early Slavonic hymnody.

Timely?
(Sigh.) Yes.
As we tell the stories of our time,
and watch history repeat itself.

Aaron’s music is thoughtful, compelling, driven.
It says, stand up.
It says, we endure.

Album #41.
More coming.
Stay tuned.

PARMA Recordings Paul Vazquez
Album artwork Steven Bradshaw

This album was made possible through the generous support of Carol Westfall, Christina Gryc, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and New Music USA’s Creator Fund in 2025-26.

The Book of Never was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University with generous support from the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago.

06/17/2026

TONIGHT ✨ Join us for the world premiere of A Hundred Years On: A New Oratorio about the 1876 Centennial Exposition with The Philadelphia Orchestra and The Crossing! Gates 6:00PM • Showtime 8:00PM • All tickets $18.76 or $50 🎟️

Commissioned by Highmark Mann; composed by Peter Boyer; libretto by Mark Campbell; major support provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from America250PA, National Endowment for the Arts, Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial, and Wyncote Foundation.

Address

8855 Germantown Avenue
Philadelphia, PA
19118

Website

http://www.crossingchoir.org/

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