THANK YOU FOR SingING the world with us for our 12th Triennial Festival
July 9 -15, 2023

About the 2023 Festival

The 2023 Golden Gate International Children's and Youth Choral Festival was an unforgettable week of concerts, competitions, special events, and cultural exchange. In a world filled with borders, the Golden Gate Festival helps children to build bridges. The Golden Gate bridge symbolizes the connection of two worlds - travel, conversation, and understanding between cultures. From July 9-15, 2023, participating choirs sang, learned, and lived with their peers from far and wide, rendering the faceless into friends.

Stay tuned for information for our 2026 Festival - announcing details January 2025.

Camaraderie and Competition

One of America’s most celebrated gatherings of young singers, the Golden Gate International Children’s and Youth Choral Festival attracts choirs from all over the world to perform, compete, and build international friendship. Founded in 1991, the Golden Gate Festival is sponsored every three years by the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir in the San Francisco Bay Area. It remains the only opportunity for children’s and youth choirs to meet and compete on an international field in the United States. Since its founding, the event has brought more than 3,000 young musicians from 19 countries together in friendship and harmony, performing for more than 50,000 audience members from throughout Northern California.

The Festival emphasizes building respectful community among singers.  Daily massed choir rehearsals and special events - including a boat cruise of San Francisco Bay, and a dance following the final concert - provide opportunities for singers and adults to make friends and meet colleagues in a supportive environment.

A hallmark of the Golden Gate Festival is the hospitality offered by the PEBCC community in the form of homestays for visiting international singers. We believe that sharing our homes with children from faraway cultures enriches our lives and theirs; it is an expression of the goodwill that underlies the spirit of the festival. 

“If we bring children together from distinctly different cultures, we can help them connect as real people to real people. We can sidestep social conditioning and create bridges of understanding that make it difficult to harbor ill will. These children have a genuine experience, beyond soundbites and newsflashes; they have joy.” Robert Geary, Founding Artistic Director