In the early 1990s, a small group of women started asking: what if Ames had a women’s choir of its own?

They approached Steven Hoifeldt, then newly arrived in Ames and already directing the Ames Choral Society, and asked if he'd be willing to be their director.

He said yes.

The first rehearsals were held in Steve’s house, sometimes with twenty women packed into the room. There wasn't much sheet music written specifically for treble voices, so he went looking through borrowed scores, publisher catalogs, and anything he could find that matched what he was after: music with real craft, where the text and the music moved together, where every section had something worth singing.

That search became something of a calling. Choral music written specifically for women's voices has always been comparatively rare. Even Brahms, one of the first major composers to write for women's choirs, only did so because a group of women in his era finally had the means and the time to rehearse and perform. The tradition simply hadn't been built out the way it had for mixed or men's choirs. Three decades later, Steve still works hard to find exciting music — tracking down new and exciting composers, contemporary settings of classic texts, and music that treats women's voices and stories as essential to the art form.

What started as a trial run in a living room became Good Company: Ames Women's Chorus, an auditioned ensemble that has spent over thirty years proving, concert after concert, that treble voices can carry a serious and wide-ranging program entirely on their own terms.

Hoifeldt still directs the group today. Two of the original nine founding members are still with the group. And the choir now fills St. Joseph’s Lutheran Church twice a year with repertoire that ranges from Renaissance polyphony to Broadway.

If you ask Steve what's kept him at it for thirty years, he doesn't talk about ambition or proving anything. He talks about something simpler: most women leave choral music behind the moment they graduate college, because nothing exists to catch them on the other side.

Good Company is proud to be that community: a place for women of all ages to enjoy the beauty and power of choral music for a lifetime while also having a whole lot of fun together.