Young voices: the Children's Choir and the youth orchestras

1973 — today

The training ground: Fort Wayne's most durable music-education institution began in a Catholic school music room. In 1973, music teacher Jocelyn Basse founded the Children of Peace Choristers to give area children the choral time school schedules could not; she began with about twenty singers. The choir was incorporated in 1984 as the Fort Wayne Children's Choir, and it grew into a regional program of graded ensembles — preparatory and apprentice choirs up through the Concert Choir, the Youth Chorale for high-school singers (organized about 1998, when the choir stopped dismissing boys whose voices changed), and a Chamber Choir. Under Fred Meads, artistic director from 1999 to 2009, membership grew to some three hundred singers drawn from more than eighty schools; Jonathan Busarow, hired in 2012, leads an organization of roughly 250–300 singers in eight choirs, teaching by the Kodály method, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a concert at Purdue Fort Wayne's Rhinehart Music Center on May 7, 2023. The instrumental parallel is the Fort Wayne Philharmonic's Youth Orchestras — a Youth Symphony Orchestra of some sixty-six advanced high-school musicians and a Junior Strings ensemble — which play side-by-side with the Philharmonic itself, as they did under Andrew Constantine in the Sibelius Finlandia of April 9, 2016, and which have been directed since 2018 by Troy Webdell. The school-band and school-choir system behind both institutions is carried in the Schools record; the Conservatory of Music chartered in 1871 (see the Packard entry) is their common ancestor — Fort Wayne has been formally teaching its children music for a century and a half.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Children's Choir (fwcchoir.org) and its anniversary coverage — InNorthwestNews/News-Sentinel, "Fort Wayne Children's Choir turns 50" (2023), and Whatzup (2003; 2025): Jocelyn Basse's 1973 Children of Peace Choristers, the 1984 incorporation, Fred Meads's 1999–2009 tenure and growth to 300 singers from 80-plus schools, the Youth Chorale's origin, Jonathan Busarow's 2012 hiring, and the May 7, 2023 fiftieth-anniversary concert.
2. League of American Orchestras, Symphony magazine "Who's In" (June 4, 2018), and Whatzup, "Youth Orchestras allow up-and-comers to shine" (2024) — Troy Webdell's 2018 appointment and the Youth Symphony Orchestra and Junior Strings as constituted.
3. Fort Wayne Philharmonic (aroundfortwayne.com, March 15, 2016) — the April 9, 2016 side-by-side Finlandia with the Youth Symphony Orchestra.