Sing Out Strong
Sing Out Strong is a multi-year community-based project where we reach out to individuals in our communities and commission them to write texts on activist themes that resonate with them personally, such as immigration, colonization, essential workers and incarceration.
Sing Out Strong: Environmental Voices
In spring of 2025, we will explore the question “What does climate change mean to your generation?”
Explore previous Sing Out Strong themes by clicking through the options below:
Sing Out Strong: Emancipated Voices
Sing Out Strong: Emancipated Voices asks the question: “What does voting mean to you?” Composers young and old submitted their musical responses to this poignant question in a Call for Entries in 2023. Composers were selected by a panel consisting of renowned composers Carlos Carrillo and Kitty Brazelton, as well as White Snake Projects’ Music Director, Tianhui Ng.
Representing various socio-economic, age, gender, and racial backgrounds, the chosen range from young and emerging composers to established, award- winning ones. White Snake Projects then paired the composers with local Massachusetts-based residents of all ages both young and old, representing the melting pot of heritages in the United States. Four of the writers are students at Boston International Newcomers Academy (BINcA), a public high school devoted to recently arrived immigrants.
Sing Out Strong: Remembered Voices
Sing Out Strong: Remembered Voices is a live, virtual concert, featuring ten new songs written with families who lost loved ones to the virus. Premiering on March 11, the performance marks the day two years ago that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. With the idea of creating a musical memorial to all the lives lost to COVID by focusing on a cross-section of specific stories, White Snake Projects located ten families willing to share their memories of their loved ones. The performance marks the fifth installment of White Snake’s popular community song initiative.
Sing Out Strong: Incarcerated Voices
White Snake Projects collected stories from writers experiencing incarceration about their experiences exiled from families, friends and community. We’ve heard about what they do, how they’ve been coping, their hopes, their fears, their families and their despair – anything they’re moved to write about. We come away awed by their essential brilliance as they find new ways of dreaming, of communing, of living, of transcending.
Through the magic of a new audio plugin, Tutti Remote, invented by Jon Robertson, our audio engineer, you will hear LIVE singing by our two singers and LIVE playing by our cellist and pianist as they perform in the safety of their homes.
Sing Out Strong: Essential Voices
Sing Out Strong: Essential Voices The pandemic has changed our entire way of life. It has changed the way we work, recreate, eat, learn, teach, interact with friends and family, etc. It has forced us to confront the fact that life is precarious, fragile and precious. It has exposed the great divide in American society, with black and brown people disproportionately succumbing to the virus, as compared to white people.
We collected stories from essential workers about their experiences working on the front lines. We heard from medical personnel, hospital housekeepers, grocery store workers, delivery people, and other essential workers. We heard about what they do, how they’ve been coping, their hopes, their fears, their families, their despair, and anything else they were moved to write about. We then paired those texts who composers who set their words to music. The stories were then presented during SOS: Essential Voices.
Sing Out Strong: Immigrant Voices
Sing Out Strong: Immigrant Voices composers and writers come from all over the world, reflecting the diversity of America, and Boston in particular. They bring with them the music and stories of Peru, Latvia, India, China, Taiwan, Mexico, Haiti, Brazil, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic. They come from diverse socio-economic, age, gender, and racial backgrounds. Some have day jobs as teachers, professors, counselors; some are musicians, others are high school students, retirees, cooks, waiters, homemakers, and parents. But all are activists who believe that music and storytelling have the power to change lives.
Sing Out Strong: Decolonized Voices
Sing Out Strong: Decolonized Voices composers and writers come from all over the world, reflecting the diversity of America, and Boston in particular. They bring with them the music and stories of the Nipmuc Tribe of Massachusetts, Cape Verde, Hong Kong, the Dominican Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Vietnam, Haiti, the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, and the multicultural melting pot of heritages in the United States. They come from diverse socio-economic, age, gender, and racial backgrounds. Some are professional musicians, some are high school students. But all are activists who believe that music and storytelling have the power to change lives.
Interested in participating in Sing Out Strong as a composer or lyricist? Learn more below: