The award-winning Monmouth Civic Chorus (MCC) is holding auditions for new members throughout the month of January, beginning on Wednesday, January 8, 2025. Any interested candidates may submit an electronic application describing their musical experience and schedule an audition with our Artistic Director, Dr Ryan Brandau. Once auditions are completed, candidates will be notified via email about their acceptance.

MCC rehearses on Wednesday evenings from 7:00pm to 9:30pm at the Monmouth Reform Temple in Tinton Falls, NJ. Weekly rehearsals begin with a warm welcome from our Artistic Director Ryan James Brandau, then continue with an extensive warm-up, dedicating time for members to better understand how to use their voice efficiently and expressively. A typical season includes three concerts. The 2024-25 season features a December holiday concert at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank with traditional Christmas carols and other popular holiday songs woven into a program that includes selections of movements from Handel’s Messiah; a concert in March featuring a full-length performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah; and a concert in May featuring Sarah Kirkland Snider’s acclaimed 2018 Mass for the Endangered alongside a selection of shorter works.

Monmouth Civic Chorus values a high level of musicianship among its singers. The audition process is divided into four key parts: a solo, a vocalization exercise, a pitch memory exercise, and sight singing. The solo can be chosen from any genre (art song, aria excerpt, musical theater, folk song, etc.) and be in any language. The sight singing portion of the audition is just one component of a broader assessment of your potential contribution to the ensemble, as members of MCC have varying degrees of music literacy and sight singing abilities.

For more information about the audition and rehearsal process, and to download the member application, please visit https://monmouthcivicchorus.org/auditions/.

Monmouth Civic Chorus makes the music that moves you. The Chorus has been called “near-flawless” (Asbury Park Press), “alive and evocative” (The Star-Ledger) and “superior” (Red Bank Green). MCC is the proud recipient of the 2008 ASCAP/Chorus America Alice Parker Award, the 2010 Spinnaker Award for Arts and Culture from the Eastern Monmouth Area Chamber of Commerce, and a third-place winner of the 2018-19 American Prize Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music.

Among audiences, MCC Artistic Director Ryan James Brandau is best known for dynamic and uplifting choral and orchestral performances, whether he himself is at the podium or his arrangements on the program. The New York Times hailed his recent debut appearance at Trinity Church Wall Street, conducting its iconic annual Messiah, “the gold standard” against which others “paled in comparison.” For both expert and new listeners, his interpretations are at once resplendent with the past and resonant with the present, earning the Times’ praise as “urgent and eloquent,” “burning and gladdening,” “intimate, alternately sober and joyous,” and, most essential to Ryan’s pervasive artistic intent, “modest yet monumental.”

In addition to his work with Monmouth Civic Chorus, Ryan serves as Artistic Director of Princeton Pro Musica and Amor Artis, a chamber choir and orchestra in New York City. He has prepared choruses for the Vienna Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and New Jersey Symphony and has taught and conducted at Westminster Choir College, Santa Clara University, and Smith College. He holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the Yale School of Music, a Master of Philosophy in Historical Musicology from Cambridge University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Princeton University.