by Karen Lunde
Back in his twenties, Matthew Melendez had a reputation for being “the kid who made grown men cry.” As Director of Small Business at both Microsoft and Intel, the self-described “Nuyorican” wasn’t exactly known for his patience, but rather for his efficient bluntness. Melendez’s directness came off as sharp and intense in easygoing Pacific Northwest settings.
So it surprised his then-husband when, years later, Melendez recruited some neighbors in Union, Washington to form a casual choir, the Great Bend Chorale. After the second rehearsal, his husband looked at him and said, “You have eternal patience when you’re in front of that choir.”
Although Melendez and his husband would eventually divorce, he’s been thinking about that observation ever since, watching it unfold in real time like a found gift. “No matter who you are, when you’re standing in front of me doing your best to sing something, I just fall in love with you,” he says. “I don’t know what it unlocks, but something does.”
This fall, that quality steps into a new room. Matthew Melendez, 58, has been named the incoming Artistic Director of Olympia’s Peace Choir, assuming the role in September when the new season begins. He follows Kerri Lynn Nichols, who founded the choir in 2010 and has shepherded it for 16 years into a distinctive South Sound community chorus.
Earlier this spring, Melendez stepped into his audition for the role of the Peace Choir’s new artistic director with a mix of excitement and nerves, despite his decades of experience as a conductor, educator, and nonprofit arts leader.
“It’s not like (Nichols) didn’t just do this for 16 years,” Melendez says as he reflects on what it means to step into the shoes of an artistic director whose choral community is wrapped around her legacy. “She’s the founder! And there’s something special about that, right?”
Not long after that audition, the Peace Choir board reached out to offer Melendez the artistic director role. Nichols wrapped up her final season with the choir this spring and Melendez will take the helm when rehearsals resume in September.
Melendez frames his new role with the Peace Choir as one of stewardship, saying he plans to spend his first months listening and learning. “It’s really important to me that I do everything in my power to keep this spirit consistent,” he says. “To keep the vibe and the welcoming nature consistent. Maybe even grow.”
Artistically, Melendez has built his career around creating ambitious, community-centered musical experiences. In addition to his new role with the Peace Choir, he continues to serve as executive director of the Great Bend Center for Music, a Mason County nonprofit focused on music education and performance. He also directs the Great Bend Chorale. His work often blends musical excellence with social and cultural themes. Under his leadership, the chorale performed Borders, a large-scale work exploring immigration, identity, and belonging that premiered at Carnegie Hall and later earned an American Prize for its Shelton performance.
Melendez describes music not simply as performance, but as a way to foster connection, growth, and reflection, both within a choir and within the broader community.
The Peace Choir is a non-auditioned community chorus open to anyone who wants to sing, regardless of training or experience. For Melendez, that’s not a constraint; it’s the whole point.
“There’s just nothing that bridges forms of social capital more effectively or more quickly,” he says of choral singing. “That is the literal antidote to everything wrong in our society right now.”
It’s a big claim, but Melendez has spent years accumulating evidence for it, including a doctoral degree with research grounded in the science of flow, the highly focused mental state first studied by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. What many people don’t know, Melendez says, is that Csikszentmihalyi began his flow research in the 1970s partly because he found it so consistently present in choir rooms.
His approach involves what he describes as a Venn diagram: what he’s drawn to musically, what the choir wants to sing, and what will actually build strong technique. The overlap is where he programs. It’s a framework that keeps him honest about the difference between leading a choir and satisfying his own tastes “A lot of conductors just choose what they want, and the singers go along,” he says. “But that’s not the kind of choir I steward.”
Like Nichols before him, Melendez believes non-auditioned choirs and quality singing can go hand in hand. His programming centers around moving the choir’s skills forward. He believes in balancing the joy of communal singing with the right amount of difficulty. He asks himself: “What music is going to challenge them just enough… but not frustrate them?” He describes the experience of having a choir that’s prepared, but not over-prepared, which he says leads to bland performances. “When the choir is like, ‘Okay, are we gonna pull it off?’ … you can see it, you can just feel it. It’s just like, ‘We’re doing it! We’re doing it!'”
And that energy is the lightning-in-a-bottle Melendez hopes to capture, so that the choir will not only have an exciting experience, but its audiences will, too. “Modern audiences are different,” he says. “We all have TikTok attention spans now.”
Melendez acknowledges that leading a choir dedicated to peace and social justice is a unique challenge in a time so politically and socially polarized. “It’s the hunt for common ground,” he says. “There’s always going to be more that we can agree on than we don’t.”
“It’s important for artists to pose the hard questions,” Melendez continues. “If artists start getting timid, then where are we?”
Looking ahead to September, Melendez will begin the work of getting to know the Olympia Peace Choir while managing a full dance card that includes his nonprofit work with the Great Bend Center for Music—backed by a board of directors he says has been supportive of his expansion into the Olympia music scene—his work with the Great Bend Chorale, and even an appointment to a statewide Arts for All coalition. But it was an opportunity he just couldn’t pass up.
“People who are passionate about non-auditioned choirs are not common,” he says, “So this is a good fit.”
Melendez will bring his blend of growth, joy, belonging, and artistry to the Olympia Peace Choir’s rehearsals when the season resumes in September. Learn more ot theolympiapeacechoir.org.
In June, the Great Bend Chorale will visit Olympia with its latest performance, I Was a Stranger, which includes the Borders cantata the group debuted at Carnegie Hall. Borders is a a sweeping choral work exploring immigration, identity, and belonging through music, poetry, and firsthand immigrant narratives. Blending Salish, European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latinx musical traditions, the piece asks not simply where borders exist, but how people choose to treat “the stranger in our midst.”
Photos courtesy of Olympia Peace Choir.
WHAT:
I Was a Stranger | Great Bend Chorale
WHEN:
Sunday, June 7, 2026, 4 PM
WHERE:
Olympia First Methodist Church, 1224 Legion Way SE, Olympia
COST:
$22
MORE INFORMATION:
https://greatbendmusic.org/go/i-was-a-stranger-sunday/