THE BEAT GOES ON earns 2025 Best Practice Award from the Virginia Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services and the Commonwealth Council on Aging!
SAVE THE DATE! Our spring concert is May 1, 2025 at 6pm! Come sing with us!
If you are interested in joining us next season, please complete this form to be added to the email list or email joculligan@vt.edu
No audition required! Open to all!
Want to learn more about our choir? Check out the following videos and articles about it!
Here is some information regarding our rehearsal schedule. Please email Joanna Culligan (joculligan@vt.edu) with questions and for more information!
Rehearsals will include about 30 minutes of social time followed by about an hour of singing rehearsal. Setlist for last season included multi-genre songs that are songs about MUSIC! This season, we’re breaking out our DANCING shoes to make it all music about DANCING! Here’s our setlist from last season on Spotify.
The Beat Goes On started in Fall 2023 with a start-up grant from the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology, The Beat Goes On, a Community Choir Project aims to grow the Town-Gown relationship between the Virginia Tech community and our older adults population in Blacksburg, Virginia, with a big data twist.
This choir is specifically designed to invite persons experiencing cognitive change (usually due to a form of dementia) and their caregivers to engage in choir singing together with students, faculty and staff from VT, along with other members of the community. Singing in a choir has a wide range of physiological benefits, such as improving breathing, posture and muscle regulating heart rate, as a pain management tool , supporting a healthy immune system, improving the symptoms of some chronic diseases and improving the overall status of someone’s physical health.