Iris Levine featured in Chronicle of Higher Education

Congratulations to ACDA’s National Women’s R&S Chair for her recent feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Women’s choirs . . . are now well recognized as a means to not only broaden students’ musical experience but to help keep them enrolled. Ms. Levine, chairwoman of the music department at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, intends to help that trend continue in her new role, as the national repertoire and standards chair for women’s choruses for the American Choral Directors Association.

 

She plans to be a strong advocate for women’s choirs, encouraging conductors to form such groups at their schools and colleges. She will also recommend new repertoire and commission new compositions that meet the choirs’ musical and emotional needs. “When you’re working with a women’s chorus, you’re dealing with, sometime along the way, these women have not been treated at the same level. That’s a given,” she said. 

Women’s groups are also gaining prominence at the high-school level, where there are typically more women participating in choir than men. And because there is a larger talent pool, in many cases, the women’s groups may be of better quality than the mixed choirs at that level, Ms. Levine said. “If you take the highest-performing women and put them in the top group, the second-tier group is on par with the men,” she said.

 

Budget cuts eight years ago forced California Polytechnic to cut its women’s choir, Ms. Levine said. But she still takes her experience and advocacy back to the classroom, where she stresses high standards and a variety of ensemble experiences, including all-female choirs, so her conducting students will be well prepared when they go out into the schools and colleges to teach. “I always want women’s choirs to be represented at the table. I want women’s choruses to always be heard from,” Ms. Levine said.