About Resonance Ensemble

In its fifteenth season, Resonance Ensemble, a professional vocal ensemble based in Portland, Oregon, creates powerful programs that promote meaningful social change.

Programming with Purpose

Resonance Ensemble, a professional vocal ensemble based in Portland, Oregon, creates powerful programs promoting meaningful social change. Resonance’s award-winning programming takes a radically collaborative approach, developing concerts in conversation with community partners. Resonance commissions and champions new works by composers and poets whose stories have been underrepresented on the concert stage.

Resonance Ensemble works to amplify voices that have long been silenced, and they do so through moving, thematic concerts that highlight solo and choral voices, new music by composers and poets whose stories have been underrepresented on the concert stage, visual and other performing artists, and community partners. 

Exceptional Artistry

Under Artistic Director Katherine FitzGibbon, Resonance Ensemble has performed challenging and diverse music, always with an eye toward unusual collaborations with artistic partners from around the country: poets, jazz musicians, singer-songwriters, painters, playwrights, and dancers.

The Resonance Ensemble singers are “one of the Northwest’s finest choirs” (Willamette Week), with gorgeous vocal tone, and they also make music with heart. Resonance has commissioned new works from composers Jasmine Barnes, Kenji Bunch, Melissa Dunphy, Renée Favand-See, Damien Geter, Joe Kye, Kimberly Osberg, Judy A. Rose, Vin Shambry, Mari Esabel Valverde, Freddy Vilches and poets S. Renee Mitchell and A. Mimi Sei. Each concert connects the musical experience with tangible ways the audience can take action in collaboration with our community partner organizations.

Tangible Connection

The groundbreaking work that Resonance Ensemble has been producing over the last few years has been noted by local media and national arts organizations. In Oregon Arts Watch, Matthew Andrews described Resonance as “Part social commentary, part group therapy, and part best damn choir show in town" (June 2019). Chorus America honored Artistic Director Katherine FitzGibbon in the summer of 2019 with the Louis Botto Award for Innovative Action and Entrepreneurial Zeal for her work rededicating Resonance to promoting meaningful social change, and for the meaningful community partnerships she creates.

For the tribute to Dr. FitzGibbon, please visit click here.