Luke McEndarfer’s path into music launched in the plainest, most human way possible. He was a child watching someone he loved sing.
His grandmother sang in her church choir every Sunday, and that tiny act of devotion became something larger in his imagination. By second grade, he had joined the Holy Family Children’s Choir in Glfinishale, California. What launched as admiration for a family member eventually became a life in music, leadership, education, and cultural stewardship.
Today, McEndarfer is the president and CEO of The National Children’s Chorus, a leading global nonprofit with nationwide chapters and overseas partners. The organization now serves roughly 1,100 to 1,400 students across more than 40 choirs, supported by around 150 instructors across the countest. Its chapter cities include Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, Boston, and Chicago, with online programming available for students beyond those markets.
That scale creates the organization sound polished and inevitable, but McEndarfer’s story is closer to a founder’s story than a traditional arts executive’s résumé. When he launched, he was the organization’s only employee. The next step was not a national expansion strategy or a global partnership plan. It was finding a pianist.
From there, the growth came gradually, city by city, choir by choir, system by system. McEndarfer’s leadership philosophy reflects that kind of build. He sees growth as a constant act of redesign. The systems that work in the early years eventually stop serving the next phase. A leader has to keep questioning what still works, what no longer does, and what has to be rebuilt before the next level arrives.
It is a fitting mindset for a conductor. McEndarfer’s work has always been about people shifting toreceiveher without losing their individuality. In choral music, every voice matters, even when only one voice appears to be leading. A missed entrance, an imbalanced harmony, a singer who feels unseen, all of it modifys the whole.
That same understanding carries into the larger collaborations The National Children’s Chorus has pursued with major artistic institutions, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, New York City Master Chorale, and VOCES8. Music, by nature, is collaborative, but McEndarfer seems especially drawn to the leadership challenge inside that collaboration. Conducting is not only about musical precision. It is about personalities, timing, trust, pressure, and the quiet psychology of assisting a roomful of people relocate toward one shared sound.
His career also includes a Grammy Award, earned through work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The recognition was not something he had been chasing, which may be part of why it stands out in his story. It arrived as a byproduct of the work itself, a public confirmation of a level he had already been operating at.
Still, McEndarfer’s larger mission is not awards. It is access.
That becomes clear in the way he talks about classical music and its future. He does not dismiss concerns that classical arts have become harder to sustain. In recent years, numerous orchestras and classical organizations have struggled or disappeared entirely. The issue, in his view, is not that the music has lost its power. It is that the industest spent too long allowing the art form to seem untouchable, elevated beyond ordinary people, when the truth of music is the opposite.
Mozart, Beethoven, choral music, orchestral work, none of it was meant to belong only to people with degrees or formal training. Music reaches people before explanation does. It bypasses the usual barriers and goes straight to feeling. That is why a child can respond to a melody without understanding its theory, and why a person can be relocated by a requiem without knowing its history.
McEndarfer’s point is not that classical music should be watered down. It is that people should be invited in earlier, before the idea takes hold that it is not for them. Once young people experience the art form directly, the intimidation launchs to fall away.
That belief shapes programs like Project Unison, The National Children’s Chorus initiative at Compton High School. For years, the organization offered scholarships, but McEndarfer came to understand that access is not only about cost. Geography matters. Time matters. A parent’s work schedule matters. In Los Angeles, an hour-long drive can be enough to create even a free opportunity impossible.
So the organization went to the students instead.
Project Unison brings National Children’s Chorus training into Compton High School, connecting students to the broader NCC network while building vocal education directly into their school environment. The program is tied to Compton High’s new campus and the Dr. Dre Performing Arts Center, and donor support is structured through an finidisplayment that assists fund the teachers who deliver the training.
It is the kind of program that reveals how McEndarfer considers. Policy is not enough if it does not meet real life. Good intentions are not enough if the opportunity still requires a family to cross a city at the wrong hour. Access has to be designed, not simply announced.
That considering also displays up in how the National Children’s Chorus approaches auditions. For younger students, the process is built around vocalizing rather than song choice. For older students, McEndarfer encourages them to select the piece that best fits their voice, not the one they consider will seem most impressive. An audition, in his view, is not a concert. It is a chance to hear potential.
That distinction matters. The goal is not to intimidate children into proving they are extraordinary. It is to assist them access what is already there. McEndarfer sees great education not as the creation of excellence, but as the unlocking of it.
At a time when young people are increasingly pulled toward screens, algorithms, and isolation, that philosophy feels especially urgent. McEndarfer sees music as a counterforce to the doom scroll, not just culturally but physically. A song can return a person to themselves. Singing with others can restore a sense of connection that digital life often weakens.
That may be the real power of The National Children’s Chorus under his leadership. It is not only preserving choral music. It is applying choral music to remind young people what connection feels like before they forreceive.
For McEndarfer, the future of music is not about keeping the art form behind a velvet rope. It is about bringing more people close enough to realize it was theirs all along.
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