WELCOME TO THE SECOND WEBINAR IN OUR
TOGETHER AT HOME SERIES
New Wine in Old Bottles:
The Modern Passion-Music Tradition
with Dr. Michael McGaghie ‘01
Associate Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities at Macalester College
Join us for a stimulating conversation about how contemporary choral music renews itself through critiquing its own past. Modern composers have often found inspiration in the legacies of Baroque forms, notably those of the Bach Passions. Dr. McGaghie will guide us on a tour through some of these modern adaptations of the Passion tradition, which address themselves to issues of class, race, sexuality, and other contemporary topics. We’ll take a special, close look at Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed (2015), a TTBB work that centers the voices of Black men killed by police.
This webinar will last approximately one hour and will include a Q&A session. Please click on the button below to register. Advanced registration is appreciated, but you can register even while the webinar is in process. Once registered, you will receive an email notification with a unique link to join the webinar.
Dr. Michael McGaghie ‘01
Michael McGaghie is Associate Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities at Macalester College, where he conducts the Macalester Concert Choir and Chorale and teaches courses in music history and conducting. He also directs the Isthmus Vocal Ensemble (Madison, WI) and the Harvard Glee Club Young Alumni Chorus (Cambridge, MA). He has also served as guest conductor of the Twin Cities chorus Singers in Accord, chorusmaster of the Minnesota Bach Ensemble, and an ensemble tenor within the Minnesota Beethoven Festival Chorale and The Singers. He remains active as a clinician throughout the United States and abroad. A strong advocate for the music of living composers, he has commissioned and conducted premieres of works by Dominick Argento, Jake Runestad, Jocelyn Hagen, Dale Trumbore, Tarik O'Regan, Dominick DiOrio, among others.
Under his direction, the Concert Choir was selected to perform at the American Choral Directors Association’s 2016 North Central division conference, the choir’s first such invitation in nearly fifty years. He was one of seven American choral conductors selected for the ACDA International Conductors Exchange Program in China, where he taught and conducted at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and Fudan University. He currently serves as the College/University Repertoire & Resources Chair for ACDA of Minnesota.
Deeply committed to undergraduate education, Dr. McGaghie previously served on the conducting faculties of Harvard University and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. His teaching received multiple awards from Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. He holds degrees from Harvard College and Boston University, where he studied choral conducting with Jameson Marvin and Ann Howard Jones. He remains, as ever, a proud member of Red Sox Nation.