Youth Chorus of Kansas City scores a prestigious performance — at Carnegie Hall
Ryan Lenzy remembers how excited he was when he woke up on Christmas Eve in 2022.
He was headed to GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium where he and his fellow Youth Chorus of Kansas City members would sing holiday songs for the crowd at the Chiefs-Seahawks game.
Go to a Chiefs game and sing?
“Two of my favorite things together, sports and music,” said Lenzy, an 18-year-old senior at Raytown South High School.
The chorus’ founder, Ryan Main, took the entire group to Arrowhead that day, more than 100 school kids from across the metro, kindergartners through seniors in high schools.
Main, a passionate advocate for making quality music education available to all students, founded the nonprofit Youth Chorus of Kansas City in 2019. Since then the students have lifted their voices from one end of the metro to the other.
They’ve sung the National Anthem at Kauffman Stadium and the new home of the KC Current. They sang “God Bless America” at a NASCAR race and have performed at Starlight Theater, the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, local churches and so many other venues.
They went viral in February 2024 with a video cheering on the Chiefs in the Super Bowl that earned more than 1 million views between Facebook and Instagram.
Now chorus members are preparing for their most prestigious performance to date — singing at Carnegie Hall in New York City on June 8.
Lenzy has never been to New York, let alone performed where George Gershwin, Judy Garland, Stevie Wonder, Leonard Bernstein, Billie Holiday and the Beatles have captivated audiences.
“Getting to sing at Carnegie Hall my first very time (in New York) is just amazing,” said Lenzy, who has sung in choirs since he was in kindergarten.
Two of the program’s seven choirs have been invited to join other youth choirs from across the United States to perform several works by Main himself. He will direct the large ensemble.
The Youth Chorus students also will perform in a special “spotlight” feature on the famous Perelman Stage, the largest and most iconic of the three Carnegie stages. They too will perform three of Main’s choral works. He and fellow Youth Chorus of Kansas City directors Jana Houston and Bethany Main will direct.
Main’s compositions have been performed around the world. He was at Carnegie Hall in 2019 the first time one of his pieces was performed there.
“You have an idea in your head of what it’s like, and then it feels more important when you’re there, like this is an important stage for a reason,” said Main, professor of Choral Arranging at the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music and Dance.
“All the most famous musicians in the world preformed here. And so yeah, it’s just a really special, once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience.”
The chorus has been raising money for months to pay for the trip. It still needs $20,000, Main said.
“Some of our families are able to pay some of their way,” said Main. “We took a no child left behind approach to this from the beginning. If we’re going to do it every kid’s going to have the opportunity to go. It’s been a lot of work.
“We’ve done a lot of fundraising. Trivia night. Pancake breakfasts. We’ve sold popcorn. I’m starting to lose track there’s so many. It’s been a challenge.”
Main and his fellow directors in the program even volunteered to take pies to the face for a price.
“The easiest way for people to plug in is to come to the gala and see the kids,” said Main, who serves as artistic and executive director and composer-in-residence for the Youth Chorus.
The chorus will perform at its annual Dare to Dream Gala on Thursday, April 10, at The Abbott, 1901 Cherry St.
Anyone can sing
If it weren’t for the Youth Chorus, some of these students might never get the chance to perform at Carnegie Hall, Arrowhead or any of the other places the choir has sung. Most, but not all, have access to choir classes at school. Some of the kids are home-schooled.
The Youth Chorus leases space in First Lutheran Church on State Line Road, where every Monday evening parents drop off dozens of kids for weekly rehearsal. Some of the kids who are old enough to drive carpool. One girl drives in from Boone County, more than an hour away.
With the New York performance a little more than two months away, the singers are getting down to serious business. At a recent rehearsal, the students received a firm reminder that they must practice, practice, practice or they won’t get to Carnegie Hall.
Main has grown the program from about 25 to 30 singers in its first two seasons to its current roster of 140 singers.
They sing in seven different choirs according to their age and talent. The two oldest, Intermezzo and Chorale, are going to Carnegie Hall.
Before he started the Youth Chorus, Main taught choir at Nowlin Middle School and Van Horn High School in Independence from 2009 to 2016.
Neither school had a choral program to speak of when he began, he said. But he was an engaging cheerleader for music who had about 500 students enrolled in his classes by the time he left.
“During that time I started to see music education as this vehicle not just for self-expression but also self-improvement,” he said. “Our students were learning self-discipline. They were learning how to kind of see what the next level looked like and want to work harder. They were gaining some ambition just by there being multiple choirs and (thinking), ‘Oh, I want to be in that choir.’”
He stopped teaching in 2016 to focus on composing. He has a bachelor’s degree in music composition from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and master’s degrees in music composition and music education from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
“(But) I pretty much knew as soon as I left teaching that I was going to miss it,” said Main. “I loved feeling like I was having an impact on kids’ lives, like it was giving them something really beneficial and important.
“Music itself is something anyone can pursue on their own, but doing it in this environment, with the kind of structured goals, it really was changing the course of kids’ lives. So I started to form the idea for this and within a year, I founded this organization.”
He wanted to create opportunities for students who might not otherwise have a chance to perform music. The kids come from diverse cultural and economic backgrounds.
“I really enjoy programming a really wide spectrum of music, music in foreign languages, music that takes you completely different places,” said Main. “I think that’s one of the most powerful things about music is that it’s very accessible to anyone.
“Choir is something almost anyone can do. And it’s something where, maybe you don’t feel comfortable putting yourself out on stage in theater or you don’t have the money to learn an instrument to play in band.
“It’s this thing that’s accessible to everyone. And you’re able to learn so much about yourself, about each other, and through learning these great texts that are part of the pieces we sing, you start to learn empathy and start to learn different perspectives.”
He hosts auditions several times during the year, usually right after each performance.
“And we run auditions for the entire summer so people can just at any point plug in. We just try to make it as accessible as possible,” said Main. “If someone has just learned about us and they don’t want to wait until the next school year, for example, there’s a choir at every age level, every skill level.”
Mondays are for music
Monday nights have become so important to Lenzy that he told his bosses at Walmart, where he works part-time, that he can’t work on rehearsal nights.
He’s a “theater kid” at Raytown South where last year he landed the lead in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” (“A lot of my friends love ‘Wicked,’” he said. “We’ve been singing so much ‘Wicked’ I think we’ve annoyed my choir teacher.”)
Lenzy recently earned a trip to the Missouri State High School Activities Association State Music Festival in Columbia in May where he will compete as a solo and ensemble singer against students from across the state.
The Youth Chorus has helped him both sharpen his music skills and “find so many more friends that just like the same things I do,” he said.
“That just like music and know musical references that I use and enjoy the same music that we all come together and sing even when we’re not together. Like if we just see each other outside, we just start singing.”
Molly Sheeley is 14, an eighth-grader at Discovery Middle School in Liberty. She’s in her first year with the choir and is already a standout. She comes from a musical family, sings in church and has performed in school musicals. She does not shy away from the spotlight.
“It’s honestly a great feeling to be in front of everyone and feel like you can make an impact on someone’s day. Just performing for people is awesome. I really enjoy singing,” said Sheeley, an alto.
“I definitely think I’ve improved as a singer, I get to learn something new each week and I feel like I’ve improved over all. I sing harder music than I would at school and I get to just work at a higher level and with higher expectations in a way that challenges me.”
Lenzy, a bass/baritone, has upped his singing game, too, thanks to the Youth Chorus. “Like Molly said, I’m learning music faster and more difficult music than I would have before,” he said.
His choir teacher at school recently warned him and his classmates that they would be learning three new songs after spring break. “And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s not really a challenge.’ But all my other friends were like, ‘Oh, that (stinks).’
“I think that’s just a testament to how the chorus has taught me how to learn music fast.”
Changes coming to the U.S. Department of Education have given Main pause lately as he wonders how music education might be affected in the long-term.
“I hope I’m not speaking out of turn when I say I’m very worried about the state of public education. My wife is an elementary music teacher in the area ... and all of our (music) directors are public school teachers,” he said.
“So I have a good sense of the struggles that people are facing. Teachers are getting more things put on their plate every year, things that aren’t necessarily their specialty. ... I don’t know. I think it is very possible that some arts programs will be cut. That doesn’t really help anybody.
“If kids have their choir program cut and they want to come here they’re still not getting that daily experience. We can only do so much in one day a week here.”
Ask Sheeley about how important music is in her life and why other kids would benefit from it, and she makes a perfect pitch.
“I know it’s kinda cliche. It really is, it’s like an escape maybe from any problems you might have,” she said.
“You come to choir on Mondays and you just get to sing for a bit and you don’t have to worry about anything outside. I think it’s, honestly, it’s great and I think it’s a necessary thing. I think anyone can benefit from having it in their life.”
This story was originally published April 2, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
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