The Radical Power of Singing Together
arts & culture
How courage and laughter can strengthen community
words by emily isaacson
photos by alice & chris photography
The tattooed woman took another swig of beer and fiddled with her pencil. The grandma giggled. The pre-teens mouthed lyrics to each other with the authority of true believers. A low hum buzzed around the steel brewing tanks—was that fermentation, or singing?
Both, as it turned out.
As part of Classical Uprising’s One Day Choir—the kick-off event of MudFest—a gloriously ragtag crew of strangers is gathered inside Allagash Brewing Company in Portland to learn Chappell Roan’s chart-topping “Pink Pony Club.” Rehearsal is in a brewery. The performance is in a bar. The ensemble is made up of shower soloists and car karaoke singers. There is no audition, no pressure, no perfection—just the radical, simple act of singing together.
It sounds like a party. It is a party. But it’s also something more.
As a woman and mother in the male-dominated music conducting world, I have always been different. I founded Classical Uprising because I wanted to leverage that perspective to create something different.
Something unexpected, accessible, transformative.
Classical Uprising is a Portland-based performing arts collective that shatters traditional concert boundaries to create musical experiences that awaken the imagination and strengthen communities. Founded with the conviction that classical music must evolve—questioning tradition, expanding access, and reimagining how and where music lives—I’m proud to have grown the organization into one of Maine’s most distinctive and beloved cultural forces. Programming spans masterworks to youth choirs to brewery sing-alongs and music that spills, uninvited and irresistible, into the streets—all anchored by the belief that music is not a luxury. It is civic infrastructure. It is how we remember we belong to each other.
And the event at Allagash Brewing was a perfect expression of what that means in practice. When I started sketching out the MudFest concept, I kept thinking back to a mud run I did at Chewonki at age 16. It was exhilarating to do something messy and physical and communal, something that stripped away self-consciousness and left only laughter. I wanted to bottle up that feeling and hand it to an entire city.
MudFest is what happened.
The small yet mighty Classical Uprising team made magic in March. Across 10 days of interactive performances, musical games, dance parties, and sing-alongs, we created spaces to help people center themselves in joy—to trade hibernation for connection, burnout for playfulness, routine for just enough chaos to wake the soul. Why? Because there’s something magical that happens when you invite strangers to be ridiculous together—where ridiculousness is the whole point. The room fills with courage and laughter, and you start to see yourself and others differently.
This is not incidental to the mission. In a cultural moment defined by isolation, polarization, and digital disconnection, Classical Uprising makes a deliberate argument: that joy is not a frivolous thing. That when strangers sing together in a brewery, or erupt into laughter over a game of Musical Chairs, something genuinely civic is happening. Walls come down. Assumptions dissolve. The distance we keep between ourselves—carefully maintained, constantly reinforced—suddenly feels optional.
The results speak for themselves. Each year, 5,000+ musicians and music lovers—toddlers to retirees—join us across 50+ concerts and events statewide, reaching communities across twelve Maine counties. Attendees describe these experiences as “life-affirming,” “powerful and centering,” and “explosively creative.”
Knowing the impact this work has on people’s lives is what kept my team going as we pulled off the most ambitious event series in our history, fueled by coffee and granola bars.
Back at the “Pink Pony” rehearsal, the group is ready. I count them in with the joy and focused calm of someone who has done this a thousand times and still finds it thrilling. With a collective breath, they begin.
What follows is not perfect. There are missed entrances, a few wrong notes, some barely suppressed laughter. It is, in the best possible sense, exactly what it is: a room full of strangers, finding their voices together—fittingly, anchored by the lyric,“I heard that there’s a special place / Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day.”
At the end of the performance, the room erupts in applause—for themselves, for each other, for the sheer unlikely fact of it. When the noise finally settles, one singer turns to me with wide eyes and says, “I’ve never done anything like that before—but I definitely want to do it again.”
That sentiment reverberates around the room. And that’s exactly the point.
For information on upcoming events, visit classicaluprising.org
