About us
We're a non-auditioned community choir in Springfield, Missouri — over sixty singers of every background, ability and age. We're always looking for new members.
Our story
This choir grew out of one that ended.
In the fall of 2022, Dr. Andrew James Campbell started something unusual in Springfield: a choir that put university students and singers from around the city into the same rehearsal room. It worked. Over the next two years it sang across the city, and was invited to perform at MMEA — the Missouri Music Educators Association's annual conference, and the kind of invitation choirs work for years to earn.
That choir ended in the spring of 2024. The singers in it did not want to stop. By August we had formed the Central Springfield Community Choir — independent this time, attached to no school, and open to anyone in Springfield who wants to sing.
More than 125 people have sung with us since, and around sixty are active in any given semester. We program widely on purpose: traditional choral repertoire, secular music, pop arrangements. And we sing with other people whenever we can — the Kickapoo High School choir and orchestra, the Ozark Junior High School Treble Singers, and the Molly Healy Project at the Earth Day Music Festival.
Our mission
To make good choral singing something anyone in Springfield can be part of.
We don't audition. Not because standards don't matter, but because surviving a tryout is a poor test of whether someone will become a good singer in a good choir. We ask for what actually matters — that you can match pitch and follow a line of music — and the rest is rehearsal.
And we sing with our city rather than at it: alongside high school and junior high singers, at community festivals, at a Springfield Cardinals game, in halls and churches across Springfield.
Come sing with us.
Our director
Dr. Andrew James Campbell
Director
Dr. Andrew James Campbell has directed this choir since it was founded in August 2024. He was Director of Choral Activities at Drury University, and for twelve years before that professor of music at Southwest Baptist University, where he had been an undergraduate. His master's and his doctorate, both in choral conducting, are from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.
Away from this choir he works as a vocal and choral music consultant at Christ Episcopal Church and at Lakeland Behavioral Health Services, and he teaches privately — voice lessons and coaching, and conducting.
He and his wife Alicia have been married for twenty-six years. She is the choir director at Ozark Junior High, whose Treble Singers have sung with us. Outside the rehearsal room: golf, live music, and his dogs.
Come sing with us
There's no audition. If you can match pitch and follow a line of music, you're already in.
How to join