Hudson Valley International Festival of the Voice

Located in beautiful New Paltz NY, a small, quintessential, upstate town in the Catskill Mountain region of the Hudson Valley approximately 80 miles north of NYC.  Home of Beauty, Nature, Farm to Table and of course, the Arts. Come Visit, Explore and Enjoy all it has to offer.

We offer a year-round array of programs and activities based on the belief that involving arts in a community, bond its members together.

The Hudson Valley International Festival of the Voice lasts less than a week, but we live in this community year-round, and our community is integral to our purpose and our success.

Quite simply, there wouldn’t be a Hudson Valley International Festival of the Voice without the help of the community—not just of Phoenicia and New Paltz, but all the villages and hamlets within the Catskills Mountain region of the Hudson Valley. Our community staff the Festival, serve as its army of volunteers, host artists and stage folk in their homes during Festival week, perform as members of two local choral groups and as extras and interns, and stay to applaud till the last encore has sounded. Happily, the beneficial relationship between the Festival and the community is mutual.

Over the years, as the Festival has drawn thousands of visitors—literally from around the world—it has also stimulated additional local activities, artistic and otherwise, serving as a spur to the region’s economic strength and boosting awareness of the beauties of the area and of its diverse recreational activities. We’ve also reached out around the area and across the generations to make music an essential part of community life year-round. The Hudson Valley Community Choir and the Woodstock Community Chorale, both created by Maria Todaro,  perform annually at the Festival and are featured as well at numerous local events year-round. And take a look at this year’s official Festival of the Voice banner, it was designed, as is each annual banner, by a local artist working with a handful of children chosen for their artistic potential.

All this ongoing community interaction reaches its peak at the Festival, when we call upon everyone in the audience, wherever you hail from, to experience the exhilaration of group performance when the Community Sings. No wonder we’re so proud to have been the 2017 recipients of the Health Alliance Foundation’s 2017 Community Service Award.