The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.
Free Key Choir rehearses at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Oakland, where Derek Sup is the musical director. Sup began playing piano at the age of six and has been directing music at the church for the last 10 years.
He majored in composition and decided after the pandemic that he wanted to start a choir in October 2022. He was surprised by how quickly the choir grew after they had concerts months later.
“It was still like kind of sketchy COVID time, so we were rehearsing outside in the backyard of the church in the dark — because it was October — it was really cold,” he says. “And we would do that every week until the concerts in November. The next day after the concerts, I got like a thousand emails of like, ‘How do I join this group?’ And so, the choir doubled effectively the next day. ”
The group has more than 100 members who write all the music performed by the choir.
“I think the choir world and the classical world in general has a tendency to be very buttoned up and take itself very seriously,” Sup says. “And in doing so kind of like writes off pop music and music written by amateur musicians for lack of a better word. There’s no reason to discount that music.”