Boston Children’s Chorus director Anthony Trecek-King gets young voices to sing out for justice
After 10 years as the artist director of the Boston Children’s Chorus, you’re now taking on the role of president as well. You’ve said you plan to up the organization’s focus on social justice and race and cultural harmony. How so?
Now that we’ve built a platform where we feel comfortable with where the growth is on the artistic side, we want to dig a little bit deeper and solidify the social justice side of our mission. So we’re being a little bit more intentional, particularly with the younger students, on developing programs to get them to understand, see, and value differences. We are also doing it with things like our upcoming Martin Luther King Day concert though the performance itself.
I noticed the title of the MLK concert is “Raw Truth.” What is that supposed to suggest?
It has a double meaning. The special group that we have coming in is “Room Full of Teeth,” and they use their voices in a very raw and real way. In terms of the other meaning, we’ve been ignoring certain conversations, ignoring certain topics, and kind of glossing over them and I just want us to get to the truth of where we are in society and then begin to deal with it.