Sounds of success: Choral group led by director Kolby Van Camp ’22, ’24 selected for international festival
By Ashley Pauls
K-State Alumni Association
When director Kolby Van Camp ’22, ’24 selects a new piece of music for his choir to
perform, he loves to imagine what it will sound like when all the voices blend together.
Van Camp is the founder of the Topeka-based Sonus Chamber Choir, a professional ensemble composed primarily of K-State alumni, current students and
faculty. Although the singers are scattered across the region and are only able to
rehearse for three hours once a month, they have already started making musical magic.
“You have a vision for what it sounds like in your head, and then you get to show
up and put it together,” Van Camp said. “You just keep working on it, and it sounds
better and better. This is the exciting part about music: you get to build something.
It's a slow unwrap towards a very beautiful present at the end of the day.”
The choir recently was selected through a rigorous audition process to represent Kansas
and the United States at the prestigious Montana International Choral Festival. The festival will take place July 28-31, 2027, in Missoula, Montana, and features
performances from choirs around the world, as well as opportunities for artistic collaboration
and education.
Van Camp couldn’t be more proud of his vocalists and everything they have accomplished
in their short time together.
“I'm very thankful for the singers that we have because they understand the mission,
they understand the vision,” he said. “I feel very confident that we're going to do
some cool stuff. This was the first piece of validation that I felt really comfortable
saying to the ensemble, ‘Look at the work that you've put in, and look at where it's
taking us. And we haven't even done our first concert season; it's not even over yet.’
The runway is so long for what we could potentially do.”
‘K-State changed my life’
Van Camp was “born and raised purple.” His grandparents, Dr. Robert Victor “Vic” ’57
and Marjorie Van Camp ’57, attended K-State in the 1950s, and some of his earliest
memories are of watching football games and tailgating with his family. Pursuing a
degree at K-State felt like the natural choice.
“It's always been K-State,” he said. “That was honestly one of the best decisions
I think I've ever made because it was exactly where I needed to be. The people at
the time who were there were exactly who I needed to study with, and K-State changed
my life in a lot of different ways. It's hard to explain to non-K-State people, but
K-State grads get it. It's a special place.”
Although his educational journey took a few twists and turns he hadn’t originally
planned on, he is glad things turned out the way they did.
In high school, he originally considered studying to be a concert pianist. However,
after watching a concert pianist perform and then listening to the Q&A session afterwards,
he realized that wasn’t quite the right path for him.
He decided to focus on vocal music instead, bringing with him years of performance
experience, including singing with the Lawrence Children's Choir and also attending
the K-State Choirs Summer Choral Institute. He decided to pursue a career as a professor
of music, and he studied music education and music composition at K-State. Yet as
his time as an undergraduate student was drawing to a close, something still wasn’t
clicking into place.
He got involved with student radio on campus, and the late Ian Punnett — who was a
K-State professor of practice and adviser for Wildcat 91.9 KSDB — asked him if he
wanted to call a football game on the student radio station.
“That was the coolest thing I've ever done — like that was unbelievable,” he remembers
telling Punnett after the game. And when Punnett asked if he wanted to keep going?
Van Camp’s answer was an immediate “yes.”
Punnett inspired him to enroll in the mass communications graduate program at K-State
and pursue a career in radio. Van Camp now serves as the sports director in Garden City for Western Kansas Broadcast Center.
“I tell people radio is my vocation, so music can remain my vacation,” he said.
Stepping up to the challenge
Van Camp realized that many of the friends he met through the K-State music program
had remained in the same general area following graduation, and he developed a vision
for a choir that would bring these talented singers from across the region together.
That dream became the Sonus Chamber Choir, which gave its first public performance
in 2023.
“I just started hitting up people who I knew, to see what they were doing and if they
would be interested in trying something new,” Van Camp said. “And honestly, it was
kind of risky. We had never performed before. Nobody knew who we were. We were brand
new, and we decided that we were going to sing Eric Whitacre's The Sacred Veil.”
The hour-long piece of music, which also features a piano and a cello, is a collaboration
between Whitacre and poet/lyricist Charles Anthony “Tony” Silvestri. The piece was
written in honor of Silvestri’s late wife, who passed away from cancer. Silvestri
lives in Topeka and recently retired as a faculty member from Washburn University.
“The pressure was on,” Van Camp recalls. He told Silvestri,“‘I know you don't know
me very well, but you’ve just got to trust me that we're gonna take care of this.’
It had never been sung in the Midwest before, so we had the regional premiere. Tony's
family flew out from California, and so all of these people that are central to this
story that we're telling are sitting in the front row while we're giving our first
ever concert. It was stressful, but we crushed it.”
After a brief hiatus, the group got back together in 2024. They started recording music together, and they are currently in the midst of their first full concert season. And in 2027, they will travel to Montana for the International Choral Festival.
Van Camp actually had an opportunity to attend the International Choral Festival as
a teenage singer, and now he’s thrilled to return as an adult and occupy the other
side of the podium as a conductor.
“I didn't think we were going to get it, I'll be honest,” Van Camp said. “I turned
in the tape. It's a rigorous audition process. They wanted multiple recordings. They
needed different things to see. I sent it all in, and three months later, they emailed
us and said, ‘Hey, as one of the finest ensembles in the United States, we'd like
you to represent.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, this is crazy.’”
The Sonus Chamber Choir meets once a month to practice in Topeka, which is a centralized
location for many of the vocalists.
“It's kind of grueling because there's a lot of music to learn,” he said. “There's
a lot of accountability that each of these singers have to have themselves to sit
down and rehearse their own music and show up prepared and know what the expectations
are. But all these people are professionals, and every bar that I set in front of
them, they meet it. And I'm like, great, let's set the next one and see how far we
can go. And they've risen to the challenge every time.”
That’s exactly the same sort of spirit he found at K-State.
“Every time that we were challenged, whether it was in a private voice lesson, it
was at a jury, or it was at a concert or in choral rehearsal, wherever it might be,
pretty much everybody universally always stepped up to the challenge, and they rose
to the occasion,” he said. “And I think that's a very K-State kind of thing. We're
Kansas: it's a blue collar state. There's a lot of farmers out here. There's a lot
of agricultural people that exist because of the sweat off of their own brow. They
know what the stakes are, and they do it anyway. And that's kind of what we've embodied.
“My motto these days, as described to me by one of the football coaches for Garden
City Community College, is 'you don’t rise to the level of the occasion, you fall
to the level of your preparation.' And boy, that was certainly true of my college
experience and the mentality to 'pursue the grind' that my teachers gave me.”
Van Camp plans to keep pushing the Sonus Chamber Choir to new heights, and exploring
the frontiers of choral music.
“It's up to ensembles who exist around the world to continue to remind people why
these kind of experiences are important,” he said. “You have to do stuff that's interesting
and relevant to them. You can't continue to do what worked because it worked, you
have to be new and innovative. That's very important to us in our philosophy of how
we want to do things.”
K-State alumni in the ensemble include Abby Helt ’19, Kiara Blackburn ’26, Cheryl Seely Savage ’26, Erin Grochowsky ’21, Kayla Clark ’19, Emma Curry (former student), Nicholas Lazo ’24, Ashley Peery ’21, Jacob Sweatt ’20, Matt Crank ’24, Ryan Hernandez ’23, Isaac Florez ’24, Michael Fibelkorn ’18, Oliver Hutchison ’22 and Ethan Irons (former student). Ensemble member Andrew Smith ’25 is a professor of practice in K-State’s A.Q. Miller School of Media and Communication. Corbin Montenegro and AJ Hoffman are current Music, Theatre and Dance undergraduate students.
