ACDA Symposium for Research in Choral Singing: Conference Report

The August 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “ACDA Symposium for Research in Choral Singing: Conference Report” by Patrick K. Freer. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.

Note! Submissions for Research Poster Sessions for the 2023 ACDA National Conference are open through October 19, 2022. Find more information on pages 62-63 of the August Choral Journal issue.
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The 2022 ACDA International Symposium on Research in Choral Singing was held April 29 and 30, 2022 as a synchronous virtual event. The Symposium was co-hosted by Georgia State University and Penn State University. An international group of nearly 70 choral scholars gathered to present and discuss research in a range of formats. The primary goals of the Symposium were to define the current state of research in choral singing, and to identify and coordinate issues and methodologies for future efforts. Participants represented 47 colleges and universities in the United States, with others representing universities in Austria, Australia, Canada, England, Germany, Hungary, and Spain.

The Symposium was a project of the American Choral Directors Association, through its National Standing Committee on Research and Publications. Among the Committee’s many initiatives is oversight of the International Journal of Research in Choral Singing, and the Symposium was developed to generate a body of scholarship that might be published in the IJRCS. To that end, the proceedings of the Symposium (abstracts and keynote address) have been published in Volume 10 of the journal. The IJRCS is accessed online, free of charge, through the “publications” tab at www.acda.org/ijrcs.

Symposium Events and Presentations
Two presentations framed the Symposium. The opening session contained welcoming words from Robyn Hilger, ACDA’s Executive Director, followed by a presentation by Amanda Weber, winner of the 2018 Julius Herford Prize for outstanding dissertation research, titled “Voices of Hope: The Social Impact of Singing in Prison.” The second day’s session began with the Keynote Address by Elisa Macedo Dekaney (Syracuse University), “Utilizing Multiple Research Methodologies to Examine the Intersections of Music, Race, and Food in Brazilian Culture: Applications to Research in Choral Music.”

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Read the rest of this report in the August 2022 issue of Choral Journal.