Choir Fam Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

“My job is to make people love choral music as much as I do, and that’s a lot. I really love choral music. My job is to say ‘you should care about this.’ You might care about it because it’s ravishingly beautiful or because it has a story to tell you. Even if you’re not a person who relates to choral music, you can relate to stories. We’re going to weave some sort of through-line through this program that tells you something about life that we hope resonates with you whether you’re a musician or not.”

Joshua Habermann is in his seventeenth season as Artistic Director of the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, one of the nation’s premiere professional chamber choirs. Since joining the ensemble, he has broadened its repertoire to include choral-orchestral masterworks and unique concert experiences ranging from early music to new commissions. Under his leadership, the Desert Chorale has been featured at regional and national conferences of the American Choral Directors Association, and its summer and winter festivals are among America’s largest choral events.

Habermann’s experience with symphonic choruses spans over three decades, encompassing the full range of the choral-orchestral repertoire. From 2011 to 2022 he was director of the Dallas Symphony Chorus, where highlights included Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, the Requiem Masses of Mozart, Brahms, and Verdi, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony, Rachmaninov’s The Bells, and Vaughan-Williams’ Sea Symphony. He is a frequent guest conductor, and in 2022-2023 prepared Handel’s Messiah, Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem for the San Francisco Symphony.

A passionate advocate for music education, Joshua Habermann is a regular clinician for state and national events and has led honor choirs and choral festivals in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. In 2024, he conducted Cantatas 72, 73 and 92 for Bach Santiago (Chile), a concert series dedicated to the first full cycle of Bach Cantatas in South America. He currently teaches choral literature at the University of North Texas.

As a singer (tenor), Habermann has performed with the Oregon Bach Festival Chorus under Helmuth Rilling and Conspirare under Craig Hella Johnson. Recording credits include Requiem and Threshold of Night, both GRAMMY® nominees for best choral recording. Recordings as a conductor include The Road Home and Rachmaninov’s All Night Vigil with the Desert Chorale.

To get in touch with Joshua, you can find him on Facebook (@joshua.habermann) or visit the Santa Fe Desert Chorale website, desertchorale.org.

Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.

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“You’re not going to ask a bunch of choir directors to donate to your organization — you’re going to have to go find other people who probably don’t have the type of experience with choir that choral leaders do. It’s about trying to translate not just your own personal love of choir but the reason that your choir exists, what it does for its community and its participants, the impact that your choir has on various spheres of influences. How do you translate your value to intersect with what they value so that they can look at you and say ‘you’re a cause that I want to support’?”

Alex Gartner is an educator, conductor, and composer based in Pensacola, Florida. He serves as the Artistic & Executive Director of the Pensacola Children's Chorus, where he oversees 9 resident choirs and 5 regional choirs comprised of nearly 300 singers. Combined, these programs reach an audience of 25,000 individuals, including 5,000 youth, throughout Northwest Florida.

Gartner is an active clinician, workshop presenter, and guest conductor. He has served in leadership positions with the American Choral Directors Association and Americans for the Arts, and his choirs are active throughout Northwest Florida, the United States, and the world. An accomplished composer, his arrangements are available through Santa Barbara Music Publishing, the Lorenz Corporation, Choristers Guild, Alfred Music Publishing, and MusicSpoke.

To get in touch with Alex, you can visit his website, alexgartner.com, or the Pensacola Children's Chorus website, pensacolasings.org. You can also email him at agartner@acda.org.

Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.

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“Start with the way that you structure your rehearsal, your classroom, your feedback. In terms of feedback, we talk about not giving people more than three pieces of information to work on. Working memory is affected by ADHD in particular. ‘Here's what you're doing well, here's what you can improve on, here's how you can improve it.’ That structure helps with their ability to anticipate what you're going to say and quickly implement that into their own music making.”

Dr. Peter Haley serves as Director of Choral Activities and Assistant Professor of Music at Ohio University, where he conducts the Ohio University Singers and Singing Men of Ohio and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in conducting, choral literature, and music education. He previously spent seven years as a high school choir director in North Carolina where his students were consistently chosen for honor choirs on the local, state, and regional level, while being immersed in a program that stressed collaborative music-making and artistic excellence.

Dr. Haley’s research interests include pedagogy for neurodivergent learners in the choral rehearsal, and Arvo Pärt’s sacred choral music. He has been invited to present at state and regional ACDA and MEA conferences and served as a clinician or adjudicator in Alabama, North Carolina, Ohio, and South Carolina. He has served as a pastoral musician for Baptist, Presbyterian, Reformed Jewish, and United Methodist congregations and held leadership roles on the Executive Board of the Presbyterian Association of Musicians and the Southern Region Conference of the American Choral Directors Association.

Dr. Haley holds the Doctor of Musical Arts in Conducting from the University of South Carolina, as well as a B.A. in Music from Wingate University and an M.M. in Church Music from Samford University. He has the honor of being the second-best teacher in his house, behind his wife, Ashley, and is a proud parent to Patrick and Libby Kay.

To get in touch with Peter, you can e-mail him at pahaley@ohio.edu or find him on Instagram: (@peterallenhaley).

Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.

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"That was the beginning of me working with a homeless women's choir. As someone who grew up doing music my whole life, it was just part of my DNA. This broke open everything I had ever thought or experienced about music, and it gave me some really new opportunities and new ways to look at the power and purpose of singing. For the people I was working with, it was part of what would get them through a day or week, and that was really powerful." 

Amanda Weber currently serves as Director of Worship and the Arts at Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis, where she oversees a wealth of arts programming. Her work explores the intersections of art, spirituality, and justice and their impact on community.

With a deep love for teaching, Weber has served as adjunct professor for Concordia University St. Paul and the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. She co-facilitated a Social Justice and Music January-term course at St. Olaf College and was a Vocal Instructor for theology students at Yale Divinity School. Weber also taught high school at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts in Hartford, CT.

Weber is the Founder and Artistic Director of Voices of Hope, an organization that builds choral singing communities in correctional facilities in the state of Minnesota. Weber’s doctoral dissertation, which focused on this work, was awarded the Julius Herford Dissertation Prize in 2018. She has presented on the topic of incarceration and choral singing at numerous conferences and was also invited to speak for a TEDx Minneapolis Salon in 2016.

Weber’s interest in using music as a tool for social justice grew through her work at Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, DC, where she founded Bethany’s Women of Praise, a choir for homeless women. 

Weber received a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Minnesota in 2018, a Master of Music Degree in Choral Conducting at the Yale School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music in 2013, and a Bachelor of Arts in Music and Art at Luther College in 2008. 

You can find out more about Amanda by visiting amandakateweber.com and learn more about Voices of Hope at www.wearevoicesofhope.org. You can also find Amanda on Facebook (@amanda.weber.731) or Instagram (@we6er).

Choir Fam wants to hear from you! Check out the Minisode Intro episode from September 16, 2022, to hear how to share your story with us. Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.

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"If people are taking pictures with their phones and having them in their hands all the time, why are we not leveraging these to talk about choral music? I am so tired of us being afraid of what people are going to say. Share what you're doing! Look at what your athletic programs are doing. Sports teams are sharing their losses. It's choir: 95% of the time, we don't lose. You can't lose!"

Beth Philemon is a choir teacher, business owner, product manager, dog-owner, gluten-free-pizza-obsessed traveler and lover of all things beautiful and ugly. A national board certified teacher, she has a bachelor’s degree in music education from Trevecca University, a master’s degree in choral conducting from Northern Arizona University, and a master’s of business administration from North Carolina State University. She is the founder of Choir Baton, a collaborative Instagram space, podcast, newsletter, and online membership featuring courses on teaching musicianship and ensemble skills. She resides in Raleigh, North Carolina.

You can find Beth on Instagram and TikTok: @bethphilemon and @choirbaton. You can also visit the Choir Baton website: https://www.choirbaton.com/

Check out the brand-new Choir Baton course: How to Teach Choir for Life-Long Musicianship - An On-Demand Course for Teachers with step-by-step instruction on how to address individual skills, use collaborative frameworks, accelerate student growth, and empower lifelong musicianship to keep #MorePeopleSinging.  Choir Fam listeners get 25% off with this link: https://www.choirbaton.com/offers/oZCe2W53?coupon_code=CHOIRFAM25 or go to ChoirBaton.com and use the code CHOIRFAM25 at checkout. 

Choir Fam wants to hear from you! Check out the Minisode Intro episode from September 16, 2022, to hear how to share your story with us. Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.

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"It gave me some amazing opportunities, just that one phone call, that one chance. For my grad students, that's one of the things that I really try to model and mentor and teach them: you can be a fantastic musician, but if you aren't one that seizes the moment or takes the initiative, it makes a difference."

John Dickson is Professor Emeritus and former Director of Choral Studies at Louisiana State University’s School of Music.  Holding the School of Music’s first Chair as the Edward G. and Catherine M. Galante Chair for Choral Music Education, he conducted the A Cappella Choir and supervised the masters and doctoral programs in choral conducting.  Recently retired after forty-four years of collegiate teaching, he continues his conducting through workshops and festivals, and as the founding artistic director and conductor of Coro Vocati, one of Atlanta’s most accomplished professional chamber choirs.  He also serves as one of the principal guest artists for KI Concerts.

As a conducting pedagogue, he has presented masterclasses before the Association of British Choral Directors, the American Choral Directors Association, the Royal Northern Music Conservatory (Mancester), and the Russian State Music Conservatories of St. Petersburg and Moscow.  He has conducted festivals and workshops in England, Wales, Scotland, Finland, France, Italy, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Canada, and throughout the U. S.  For three decades his choirs have been featured at conventions of the ACDA, ABCD, Texas Music Educators Association, and the National Collegiate Choral Organization.

Appointed as a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge University in 1992, Dr. Dickson sang with Sir David Willcocks and The Bach Choir; a second post-doctoral fellowship in 1998 allowed him to serve as principal rehearsal conductor under musical director David Hill.  For his summer conducting institutes Dr. Dickson has co-directed with British friends and colleagues Stephen Cleobury, David Hill and Bob Chilcott.  He is the Founding Director of the C. S. Lewis Choral Institute, featuring a professional chorus for its triennial symposium in Oxford and Cambridge.  He holds the D.M.A. degree in choral conducting from The University of Texas, at Austin, the M.M. degree in musicology from Baylor University, and has done post-doctoral study at Cambridge University, Cambridge.

You can email John at jdickson@lsu.edu.

Choir Fam wants to hear from you! Check out the Minisode Intro episode from September 16, 2022, to hear how to share your story with us. Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.

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"I call it 'choral confession.' They come up to you and tell you their history with choir: 'I don't read sheet music.' 'I'm not a soloist.' These are wonderful capable singers, musically creative individuals that love what they do and contribute so much. My hope is that a book like this can give them the confidence to look at themselves and say 'I'm not just the blending voice that maybe my seventh grade choir teacher told me I am. I'm a contributor."

Matthew Bumbach is a sought-after conductor, composer, adjudicator, and clinician who has worked throughout North America, Europe, and Africa. He is the Director of Music Ministries at Shallowford Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, GA.  Matthew has performed and recorded with such artists as Gloria Estefan, Time for Three, and Broadway's star Rachel Potter. He has published research in NCCO’s The Choral Scholar, Chorus America’s Research Memorandum Series, ACDA’s The Choral Journal, and several state and regional journals. Matthew’s choral arrangements are published by Hal Leonard. In 2022, Dr. Bumbach coauthored A Quick Start Guide To Choral Singing (GIA Publications) with Dr. Dean Luethi. Matthew lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Dr. Melissa Bumbach, and their twin daughters, Rachel and Selena. 

To get in touch with Matt, you can find him on Facebook (@mbbumbach) or email him at mbumbach@shallowford.org.

Choir Fam wants to hear from you! Check out the Minisode Intro episode from September 16, 2022, to hear how to share your story with us. Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.

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"It is important for our members to be seen in spaces that they've traditionally not been welcome to. When you feel that you belong in a space, it changes something inside of you... You learn to use your voice by singing, and then you have the confidence to go use it in ways that dramatically impact your life and the lives of others."

Erin Guinup’s pursuit of creative, uplifting, and service-oriented work is the driving force behind her varied career. She is the founding Executive and Artistic Director of the Tacoma Refugee Choir which has included singers from 66 countries and performed for over 40,000 people. With the choir, she has spoken at TEDxSeattle, been featured on PBS, and presented on hope in diverse communities for Starbucks and the Global Migrant Festival in Singapore. She has led national community singing events, spoken at national conferences for NATS, ACDA, and Chorus America, and presented workshops on the voice of leadership for Amazon and small business groups. Erin is a classically-trained soprano and has been featured with groups including Symphony Tacoma, Ensign Symphony and Tacoma Concert Band singing Puccini’s La Bohème, Handel’s Messiah, Carmina Burana, Disney’s Frozen, and her own original songs. Her internationally performed one-woman show about female composers was praised as “an amazing tour-de-force” and another show was described as “life-changing”.  A sought-after teacher in classical and contemporary vocal technique and contributing author for three books, Erin’s voice students have found success on Broadway, operatic stages, radio and television. Other career highlights include directing the world premiere of Orson Scott Card and Mark Mitchell’s He is There; performing as Mary Poppins; conducting Rob Gardner’s Lamb of God; hearing her choral works performed by other choirs; and singing with Israeli-Palestinian choir Common Ground Voices in Jerusalem and Germany. Erin was recently recognized as an American Leadership Forum fellow, OL Reign Legend, one of Tacoma’s Most Inspiring Women and one of five Women to Watch by South Sound Magazine. She became a Senior Fellow of the Tacoma/Pierce County chapter of the American Leadership Forum in 2022.

To get in touch with Erin, you can find her on Facebook (@erin.guinup) or visit the Tacoma Refugee Choir website, https://www.refugeechoir.org/ .

Choir Fam wants to hear from you! Check out the Minisode Intro episode from September 16, 2022, to hear how to share your story with us. Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.

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"It's not about only 'what do you hear,' it's about how you hear. What is the color of the sound you hear? What do you hear in the vocal mechanism? What are some of the things that they are doing that maybe are reflected in my conducting? Is my conducting reflective of the music? Is my conducting causing the issues?"

Jo-Michael Scheibe, a Southern California native, has spent years cultivating his passion for choral music and higher education. Mike, currently retired, recently chaired the Thornton School of Music’s Department of Choral and Sacred Music at the University of Southern California, where he conducted the USC Chamber Singers, taught choral conducting and choral methods, and supervised the graduate and undergraduate choral program. Before his time at USC, he spent fifteen years in Miami directing Choral Studies at University of Miami’s Frost School of Music.

Dr. Scheibe has prepared many choruses at USC and around the world. These include works with Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra, Helmuth Rilling, Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony, Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Formosa Singers in Taiwan. Under his leadership, ensembles have performed at National ACDA Conventions and National Conventions of the Music Educators National Conference. Walton, Albany, Colla Voce Music, and Naxos publish recordings of Scheibe’s ensembles.

Dr. Scheibe received his B.A. and M.M. degrees from California State University at Long Beach and D.M.A. from USC.

A champion of contemporary music, Scheibe regularly commissions and performs new works of choral literature. He has helped to launch careers of promising young composers and to promote music by international composers largely unknown in the United States. Music publishers Walton, Colla Voce Music and Santa Barbara distribute the Jo-Michael Scheibe Choral Series internationally. Composers in his series include Eric Whitacre, Susan LaBarr, Stacey V. Gibbs, David Dickau, and many others.

To get in touch with Mike, you can find him on Facebook (@drjomichaelscheibe) or send him an email at jscheibe@usc.edu.

Choir Fam wants to hear from you! Check out the Minisode Intro episode from September 16, 2022, to hear how to share your story with us. Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.

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Photo in episode artwork by Trace Hudson from Pexels

"The feeling that I got from being part of a good, and solid and warm choir culture was a big one for me. The feeling of being the person that has a hand in creating that space for somebody else and also sharing my love for music in the same breath just really appealed to me. I never saw myself going for anything else, really, except for music ed."

Alana Scott is a fervent curator of sounds, committed to sharing rich stories through the crafts of education, composition and songwriting. The Louisiana-native educator/musician treats personal experience as an opportunity to explore, honor and challenge personally formative traditions through her crafts. She currently holds the position of head choir director at a junior high in the greater Houston area, and cherishes sharing her love of her crafts with her students. Her compositions serve as vibrant melodies flecked with material retrieved through life’s lessons as a black southern woman of intersectionality– described as “boldly voiced” and “well-crafted”. Her most recently premiered work, “Joy” for string quartet, was premiered in July 2022 at the Tampa Museum of Modern Art.

To get in touch with Alana, you can find her on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/alana.scott.315) or email her at alanascott4@gmail.com .

Choir Fam wants to hear from you! Check out the Minisode Intro episode to hear how to share your story with us. Email choirfampodcast@gmail.com to contact our hosts.

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Photo in episode artwork by Trace Hudson from Pexels