Announcing the 2026 Alfred Nash Patterson Award Recipients

Choral Arts New England is delighted to announce the funding of 15 project grants totaling $33,000. Award recipients represent choral organizations from five of the six New England states. 

The 2026 Alfred Nash Patterson Grants will be used to fund initiatives to expand choral opportunities across New England, as well as unique performances of pieces that give insight into important perspectives — traditional and contemporary Yiddish music, Alzheimer’s Stories, Trans Requiem, and Anthracite Fields, to name just a few.

Learn about this year’s inspiring award recipients!

David Hoose Commissioning Grant

Building on 45 years of supporting choral compositions and performances throughout the region, Choral Arts New England (CANE) is pleased to now offer the David Hoose Commissioning Grant, a biennial $5,000 grant supporting the commission of meaningful new choral music with instrumental accompaniment. This grant supports new compositions that explore choral music’s unique capacity to help us understand our history, reflect on our present, and envision our future.

"Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. One does not have to know anything about Dido and Aeneas to be moved by her lament for him; anyone who has ever lost someone knows what Dido is expressing. And there is, finally, a deep and mysterious paradox here, for while such music makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time."
   — Steven Jay Gould, long-time member of Boston Cecilia