About PRISM
Our Mission and Team
Our Mission
To celebrate the beauty of early choral music in performance.
Our Vision
To be a world-class vocal ensemble, to create greater awareness of early music as a vibrant art form, to build more diverse audiences, and to encourage future generations of singers to engage with this music.
PRISM is a new, Los Angeles-based vocal chamber ensemble of exceptional quality that focuses on revitalizing choral music, especially works from the Renaissance. The ensemble’s goal is to offer stellar performances using a conductorless model that promotes the highest levels of collaboration, connection, and interpretation among the singers.
Our name, PRISM, reflects our philosophy of music-making. In geometry, a prism is any solid with two equal bases and parallelograms at each end, but in optics, and for us, a prism is a transparent body whose polished, refracting surfaces change one’s perception when looking through it.
We are a PRISM for choral music, providing a way to discover the beauty embedded in early music for vocal ensemble, and in works by later composers whose creations are either explicitly or implicitly inspired by it. Additionally, we see harmony and balance across the eras, and we look to explore the influences and resemblances between newer works and their predecessors.
Adrien Redford, Co-Artistic Director
Donna M. Di Grazia, Co-Artistic Director
Hayden Eberhart, Administrative Director
Leadership
We are so happy you have come to learn more about PRISM! We founded PRISM in 2019 as a way to perform mostly Renaissance choral music—a shared love of ours—in a way that’s a little different than what we’ve done before. This choir is conductorless by design in order to create a more collaborative and collegial environment where the singers can bring their individual strengths to the table, and can be more attuned to each other.
We know each other through Pomona College, where Adrien and Hayden were students and sang in the Choir and Glee Club under Donna’s direction. Since graduating, Adrien (PO ’14) and Hayden (PO ’07) ended up working together in the office at the Los Angeles Master Chorale, where they were constantly talking about how much they missed working with Donna. So why not create a group where we could all work together again and sing the music we love?
Donna M. Di Grazia is Co-Artistic Director of PRISM. She is an awesome alto and expert music historian and helps keep the other two of us in the know when it comes to historical context, repertoire, and performance practice.
Email Donna
Adrien redford is Co-Artistic Director of PRISM. He is a brilliant baritone who runs our rehearsals (with Donna), and who works on big-picture things related to the ensemble’s educational programming, community engagement, and fundraising.
Email Adrien
Hayden Eberhart is the Administrative Director of PRISM. She is a sensational soprano who prefers to be behind the scenes, rather than actually speaking in front of people and being visionary.
Email Hayden
Singers
