How This Cobble Hill Kids Chorus Worked With Beyonce

COBBLE HILL, BROOKLYN — A local kids chorus is making headlines for its work with a long list of popular celebrities, bands and high-end brands, most recently Beyonce herself.

The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, which is headquartered on Pacific Street, revealed to The New York Times, how one of their recordings ended up being used on Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s OTR II World Tour last year.

“Is Beyoncé Knowles the Beyoncé?” Dianne Berkun Menaker, the chorus' founder and artistic director apparently asked after reading an email from the Queen Bey during a staff meeting in 2018.

"I don’t think I own a Beyoncé album, so the whole thing to me was really funny,” Berkun Menaker told the Times about the springtime meeting.

Just a few months later the chorus' recording of "Its Motion Keeps" with Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw was blasting from the music power couple's tour stage across the world.

But the musical sampling is far from the only time the teen chorus has worked with celebrities.

The Times also reported that the young singers, mostly between the ages of 11 and 18, have seen their work used by Louis Vuitton and Pharrell Williams for a Chanel ad campaign; performed with David Byrne and worked with bands like the National and Bon Iver in just the last year.

Berkun Menaker established the chorus in 1992 with an attempt to make a new choral group model that would be less of a financial strain on its members and therefore more accurately reflect the community's population.

Even decades ago, the chorus was performing with big names like Elton John in 2001 and alongside the New York Philharmonic in 2002. The recording for that performance won a Grammy Award for best classical album in 2005. The year before, the chorus had performed with Elton John.

"In 2000, Berkun Menaker began commissioning pieces to outside composers," The Times wrote. "By the end of the decade, 13 different artists had written work specifically for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, a number that has since swelled to 50."

Read the Times' full profile of the group here.