For Renaissance City Choir, the only all-LGBTQ chorus in Western Pennsylvania, the annual holiday concert is a standout, the most popular show every season.
“That’s the concert [we’ve] been known for since [we] formed,” RCC board president Douglas McIntyre tells Pittsbrugh City Paper. “[And] it’s because we are going to do things that are different than any other choruses around this time [of year].”
Taking place Sat., Dec. 9 at East Liberty Presbyterian Church, the latest RCC holiday concert, entitled Fire and Ice, will include standards like “Sleigh Ride” and “Let It Snow,” as well as the Hanukkah song “Eight Days of Lights." RCC will also premiere “Little Drummer Queen,” a drag play on the classic carol, with lyrics by James Kenon Mitchell, music by Katherine Kennicott Davis, and arrangement by Kym Scott.
The big holiday concert also kicks off RCC’s 2023-2024 season.
With a mission to affirm and celebrate LGBTQ identity “through the unifying power of music,” McIntrye says RCC selects songs that are “not so much [about] Christmas and the Christian fable,” but instead focused on the spirit of the winter season.
Stemming from its holiday concert, RCC has drawn fans and performers over its nearly 40-year history — with noticeable recent growth, says McIntyre.
“Especially these past couple years since the pandemic, we’ve been out and connected to organizations in Pittsburgh more than we have been,” says McIntrye, who’s beginning his 15th season with RCC.
Originally founded as the Pittsburgh Gay Chorus in June 1985, and inspired by a similar group in San Francisco, the choir emerged as a space for the queer community to connect, “particularly because a lot of the other queer spaces — even now — tend to be surrounding alcohol,” McIntrye says.
The choir gave its debut performance in September 1985 at what was then Carlow College and featured 32 singers. The group's inaugural holiday concert was held a few months later.
McIntyre says the group performed “in small venues with small audiences,” and “there were people who wouldn’t allow us to put their names in the program.”
To make its members feel safe, the chorus changed its name to Renaissance City Choir, following Pittsburgh’s chamber music ensemble Renaissance City Winds; the name is a nod to national revitalization efforts after World War II via designated “renaissance cities” and Pittsburgh’s own Renaissance II redevelopment plan of the 1980s.
The choir also switched from performing as a mens-only chorus to adding a women’s choir in 1995, which led to the largest-ever holiday concert at that time, with 142 singers. Another standout moment in its history, the RCC website notes, was when the choir sang at Gov. Tom Wolf’s inauguration in 2015 — one of only three groups performing and the “sole” representatives from Western Pa.
Today, RCC membership has “continued to grow and adapt,” says McIntyre, and “we’ve strayed away from the gendered terms and formed together as one.” Though membership numbers vary, the choir is currently nearing its historic peak, with a mixed chorus of up to 120 singers of all gender presentations and including straight allies. It's "certainly fairly large" given Pittsburgh's size, McIntyre says.
In addition to its holiday concert, the choir performs annually during Pride Month in June. Its yearly concert season themes still incorporate the affirmative spirit of the choir, with Find Joy Together in 2018 and Calling Forth the Activist from Within in 2016, which featured a performance of Bach’s "Magnificat."
Somewhat counterintuitively, McIntyre says, the onset of COVID-19 affected RCC membership “in a positive way.” Though the chorus initially shrunk and had to find creative ways to meet, McIntyre says as “things have opened back up … [people] were really looking for the opportunity to be able to connect [again] and the choir’s a way that you get to see the same people every week.”
RCC also added streaming performances as a result of the pandemic.
“We started doing it so that the organization [could] continue to exist and to perform and be seen,” McIntyre says. “We're able to be out there, our singers were able to be out there… [And] we’re a lot more public than we had been before."
Fire & Ice: Renaissance City Choir 2023 Holiday Concert. 7:30-9 p.m. Sat., Dec. 9. East Liberty Presbyterian Church. 116 S. Highland Ave., East Liberty. $10-40. rccpittsburgh.com
A Pittsburgh LGBTQ choir has been making beautiful music for nearly 40 years
