Ginger Haselden leads a new children’s choir that’s heading to New York City.

by Mick Kelly . photo by BJ Bowen

This spring, after 30 years of singing in and leading choirs, Ginger Haselden will realize a longtime dream: watching her young students sing in a production at Carnegie Hall in New York City. “It’s a thrill,” says Haselden, who has performed in the hallowed hall ten times herself with various choirs. “They’re never going to forget that view from the stage.”

The classically-trained soprano lived in New York for ten years, first working for the United Methodist Church there, and then leading choirs and teaching music in New Jersey. When she moved to Asheville eight years ago, she kept up the choir direction and vocal coaching, and now, she’s teaming up with the Asheville Choral Society to send her students to a Carnegie Hall production of John Rutter’s Mass for the Children in April.

Haselden, a South Carolina native, started singing on a Charleston TV show, The Old Country Church, at age 5. “I was too short to reach the mic, so they built me a little box,” she recalls. In New York, she performed in musical theatre and choral productions, and then, once she transitioned out of her role as assistant treasurer for the United Methodist Church, she began teaching elementary school music. In Asheville, in addition to teaching at Randolph Learning Center and Paxton Elementary, she taught vocal lessons through Asheville Community Theatre.

Around 2006, she decided to start a children’s chorus. She wanted to catch children between ages 7 and 14, and she felt she could lead them particularly well, given her combination of musical theatre and opera training, plus the years leading public-school choirs. What she didn’t expect was the community’s immediate support for her new project. “I put out a feeler to all my friends who loved music. I said, ‘I’m gonna start this.’ And within 15 minutes, David Starkey of the Asheville Lyric Opera called and said, ‘How can we help you?” she says. “I just loved it.”

The Celebration Singers of Asheville had 30 members in its first year, all hand-picked through auditions with Haselden. Now, the 18 members of the nonprofit community chorus are all girls, but the choir is open to boys, too (as long as their voices haven’t changed). Haselden is particularly proud of the fact that several of her students over the years have become professional musicians, and one Asheville boy was a recent finalist on American Idol.

The children’s chorus rehearses weekly and performs two concerts a year, in winter and spring, often singing the National Anthem at UNC-Asheville basketball games and other events in between. Once a year, the choir visits an area retirement community, and they occasionally perform with adult choristers like the Transylvania and Asheville Choral Societies. The group also takes outings together, gathering in December, for example, to stroll through the Grove Park Inn’s gingerbread house display. “They’re bonding and having a great time together,” says Haselden, “in addition to learning to make quite beautiful music.”

For more about the Celebration Singers of Asheville, which holds auditions in January, check out www.singasheville.org.