A youth choir for a day, they sang once, and were gone.

You could call it a pop-up choir.

“Gig Harbor Sings,” a choir of about 90 Peninsula-area children, presented their first and only concert Sunday in Chapel Hill Church. Then they went home.

The one-time choir was the result of a grant from the city’s art commission to the Spectrum Choral Academy of Gig Harbor. The commission’s New Creative Endeavors program is designed to encourage new kinds of artistic activity.

The choir was composed of children in grades K-12, recruited by poster, online and by word of mouth. They were directed by Stephanie Charbonneau, artist director of the academy.

“We had kids from all over the Peninsula,” said Charbonneau. “Gig Harbor, Lakebay, Port Orchard, Belfair — we even had one child whose parents drove over the bridge from Steilacoom.”

The children had only one rehearsal, the day before the performance, and a dress rehearsal — decked out in their new “Gig Harbor Sings” t-shirts — an hour before the concert. They sang 10 songs in a variety of languages.

“We had a song from South Africa, a Spanish calypso song, a beautiful song in Hebrew — we tried to expose them to lots of different languages and cultures,” Charbonneau said.

The idea of the one-time experience, she said, was to expose children to music who may not have sung before, in the hope they would return to their schools and get involved in choir or band.

“They had a marvelous time,” she said. “And so did I.”

This story was originally published September 25, 2019 at 12:00 AM.