The Emmanuel Children's Choir is affiliated with Emmanuel Music and is in residence at Emmanuel Church in Boston's Back Bay. The choir serves a diverse group of students from the City of Boston neighborhoods such as Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, and Hyde Park, as well as children from the surrounding towns of Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Winchester and Ashland. The primary purpose of the choir is to enable the children to achieve musical excellence and accomplishment through the ongoing process of rehearsal and performance; to have a diverse membership that reflects the cultural diversity of Boston; to educate and challenge these young people to pursue excellence - musically and scholastically - thus letting the joy of musical expression become available to them; and to provide the children with a safe after-school activity. It is our hope that the choir experience will engender, through the discipline of music, the development of an inner confidence of spirit and an outer sense of accomplishment, and will encourage the children to pursue their ambitions, both musically and academically.

Founded in 1994, the choir has performed with Emmanuel Music in Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Mozart's Missa Brevis, and the prestigious Bach Cantata Series on Sunday mornings. The choir has its own series performing works by Benjamin Britten, Charles Ives, local Boston composer Peter Child, as well as favorite traditional works, and has been invited to sing for the Mayor of Boston, the Boston Partners in Education, the Boston Globe, many Boston political events and seasonal concerts, and live, on-air broadcasts on WGBH-FM Radio with Ron Della Chiesa and Robert J. Lurtsema.

Maestro Seiji Ozawa rehearses with members of Emmanuel Children's Choir

Added to all this rehearsal and performance is the Learning Lab, a rotating monthly schedule of educational events that consists of instrumental and music theory instruction. An important feature in this educational component is the Artist-in-Residence Series, where musicians from Emmanuel Music perform a short 45-minute concert for the children each month with a question and answer session afterwards. Phoebe Payne serves as the music director of the choir. She has taught at the New England Conservatory of Music Preparatory Division, the Hartt School of Music, and currently teaches in the Boston Public Schools.