The Esoterics

"Each Esoterics project is a distinctive and unrepeatable experience,

both for performers and for our audience-community;

an experience to leave you enchanted, delighted and enriched."

The esoterics is Celebrating 32 years of music in 2025. It's in no small part due to donations from people like you. We are grateful!  

As a THANK YOU for your donation this year, your receipt will include the streaming links to the past year of full concert performances!

32 Years strong

Over the past year, The Esoterics continued our tradition of highlighting singular contemporary choral compositions - showcasing harmonies, dissonances, themes & variations across our specialized spectrum of the musical and the metaphysical. See our Media Gallery below for a sampling!

We wrapped up last season (December 2024) with a contemplative work by composer Jeffrey Derus, titled CHAKRA & CHIME: A choral meditation from the Pacific Crest Trail. The 25 voices of the choir were guided by a celestial sound-bath of eight crystal singing bowls, and accompanied by the obbligato cello of soloist Paige Stockley. The work featured texts by twenty different poets, and the seven pitches of the singing bowls, with their sacred syllables (lam, vam, ram, om, etc.) were aligned to the seven chakras of the body. A celebration, tribute and meditation on the transformative experience of traveling the Pacific Crest Trail. Here is Brittni, one of our songbird sopranos, during dress rehearsal.

We opened our 32nd year in March 2025 with an epic and outlandish cycle of works by German composer Michael Ostrzyga entitled ORBIT & ORACLE: A reimagining of ancient astronomical legends. Ostrzyga composed a cappella choral works for each planet in the solar system and arranged them into a cycle called Planets and gods. These pieces not only explore the astronomical and mythological aspects of each planet and the god or goddess for which they are named, they also examine where science and belief intersect. Planets and gods was intertwined with a series of new miniatures offering ode and homage to various Strange solar system bodies (dwarfs, moons and asteroids), each of which sets itself apart in strikingly different ways. Ostrzyga captured the features and energies of these 'heavenly body' geographies in fascinating blends of musical color.  Here's a clip from our rehearsal of this project, singing "Neptune". 

May 2025 Upcoming Performances!

Please join us May 17 at 8pm in Seattle at Plymouth United Church downtown or May 18 at 7pm in Tacoma at Christ Episcopal Church. An online streaming link is also available for purchase. All details are HERE!

This May, The Esoterics will celebrate Spring with the choral music of New York composer, Martha Sullivan in our upcoming program entitled PROMISE & PROPHECY: Sonnet, saga, soliloquy, and sorcery. Sullivan is a founding soprano of C4 (The Choral Composer Conductor Collective) in Manhattan, and teaches music theory, musicianship, and composition at Rutgers University. This fully a cappella repertoire presents a collection of compositions featuring adventure, magic, mischief, romance, hope, anguish, joy, loss, longing – and of course, dragons.

The centerpiece of the program will feature Epithalamion, Martha’s setting of verse from Edmund Spenser’s wedding ode - 24 stanzas to depict each hour of their wedding day in honor of his bride, Elizabeth. Sullivan sets five of these stanzas that focus on the delights and distractions of the wedding night. This cycle, originally commissioned and premiered by The Esoterics in 2009, is replete with the elegance of Elizabethan England. 

Following this are settings from Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare – each depicting moods and metaphors on themes of love, lament and longing; the desire to create and the frustration with indifference. Then comes Madrigals of Nostradamus – four French quatrains by the celebrated soothsayer that predict secret letters, bowing unicorns, embezzling nephews, haunted houses and naked queens. This cycle will be followed by Martha’s setting of “The new Colossus” by Emma Lazarus – the same sonnet of welcome that is cast in bronze and mounted at the base of the Statue of Liberty. 

To finish the program, The Esoterics will premiere Sullivan’s six-movement cycle entitled Certain dragons. For this work, Martha penned a poem of her own and curated five others – by Keats, Sassoon, Yeats, Lazarus and Longfellow – all on the theme of dragons. In these six songs, we will celebrate the legendary creatures and their extraordinary nature: volatile, violent and virtuous; fiery, fearless and fierce.

We are so excited to welcome Martha to Seattle and Tacoma for the weekend of these concerts! 

Please join Martha Sullivan and The Esoterics for this celebration of lavish literature and sumptuous song!

Please join us in creating an exciting new season of music.

We deeply appreciate your continued support!

Read the December 2023 feature article about the Esoterics in The Seattle Times