2025 Maine Music Educators Association Conference

In this interactive roundtable discussion, choral teachers can attend and engage in open dialogue about the current All-State Auditions. Participants can exchange ideas, share their experiences with the current auditions, and give suggestions and feedback for improvement. This lively, collaborative session will begin the conversation on revamping the All-State Auditions for MMEA and lead the work of a larger committee in the upcoming fall.

All music educators enter vocal music classrooms having experienced a variety of “meals and recipes” such as ensemble participation and limited methods courses without really learning how the ingredients–the singers–are prepared and from where they are sourced. This session will director your attention away from focusing on the recipe and toward the quality of the ingredients: the training of singers as individual instruments. Immediately-applicable tools related to breath, posture, the vocal “cords,” and the relationship between vowels and consonants to an efficient vocalism will help you understand the why behind choral methods, allowing you to curate your ensembles with farm-to-table artistry.

Do your singers readily focus on the expressive elements of music they are preparing to perform? Do you wish you could find something extra special for them to sing? This session will feature a step-by-step guide to help you and your singers create a truly unique signature work that showcases your ensemble and its special talents. Students will gain new insights into the choral art as they adopt the role of composer, develop new musical and socio-emotional skills, and prepare a performance that will captivate any audience with a meaningful work that uniquely represents their collective musicianship.

Many of us have found ourselves in a situation where we needed a filler piece, or wanted to do an existing piece that wasn't available in the correct voicing. This interactive session aims to demystify the composition and arranging process, and offer some helpful tools for how to work with your choirs to create new music and arrangements. Part of the session will include a real-time, participatory demo of adapting existing music for new choral voicings

No matter the stage of career, conductors are tasked with engaging students to join and participate in their ensembles through a variety of pedagogical, musical, and marketing techniques; perhaps none as critical as closing the gap between the music students choose to listen to and the “choir songs” we painstakingly program for their benefit! This interactive session will guide participants toward the musical language of their students, where and how they collaborate outside the choir room, and how both conductor and student identify and share their implicit aesthetic preferences in any repertoire. Fresh perspectives on tried and true score preparation approaches through a “singer-songwriter” lens will illuminate ways you can tether students to the choral canon while affirming their musical taste and untapped potential as artists.

As the modern choral conductor balances an increasing list of non-artistic duties, our day-to-day work as conductors has never had more potential for discouragement as we wonder when we will ever have time to make art! This session will champion purpose-built rehearsals as the basis for our artistic fulfillment and craft. Proposed rehearsal hierarchies utilizing previous score preparation strategies will guide your diagnostic ears toward repeatable solutions to empower regular creative excellence for you and your singers.

How many of us have entered rehearsal with all the techincal ideas in the world, only to get lost real time in how to address the sound coming from our students mouths!? This session will champion purposeful score preparation as the catalyst for efficent, fulfilling, and predictable rehearsals. Building upon skills from previous sessions in theoretical analysis and vocal pedagogy, a reading-session format with hand-picked repertoire will provide a real time test drive for reformatted analytical eyes and ears.

This proposed roundtable would include elementary, middle school, high school, and college faculty from throughout the state to discuss how we as a broader community can assist eachother in promoting choral excellence at every level.

We never seem to have enough rehearsal time, so making the most of what we do have is essential. Larry will draw on his more than 40 years of teaching to offer suggestion on how to structure a rehearsal, how to deal with problems, both personal and musical and most of all how to keep our students engaged in learning. Workshop attendees will leave with ideas they can use right away in their next rehearsals.

This session will explore recruitment and retention for secondary ensembles through the lenses of equity and access. First, we will synthesize research on recruitment and retention. Then, we will offer practical and ready-to-use ideas teachers can implement into their programs. We will consider equity and access for Maine music students, underpinned by the belief that all students deserve quality music education opportunities through their public school education.