This year Choral Arts New England honors Craig Smith for his exceptional service to choral music and to the New England choral community.  The award was presented by Choral Arts New England Chair Andrea O'Connell in a ceremony on Sunday, October 28, 2007, at King's Chapel Parish House in Boston Mass.

Craig Smith died after a long struggle with illness on November 14, 2007. Choral Arts New England joins many others in mourning his death as well as celebrating his life, during which he has brought great beauty into the lifes of many and inspired choral performance at the highest levels. Memorials have been posted at Emmanuel Music andNew England Conservatory (and many other places).

Craig Smith was the founder of Emmanuel Music and has served as its Artistic Director for 35 years. In that time, his most famous achievement (but by no means his sole accomplishment) has been to lead performances of all of the Cantatas of J.S. Bach, one each week, in the context of the Sunday worship service at Boston's Emmanuel Church. He has done this at the highest artistic level, building a national reputation for his chorus, orchestra, and performance style. He has provided an example of the highest level of the choral arts and in the process has nutured the careers of numerous choral singers and soloists.

Unfortunately, Mr. Smith was unable to receive the award in person. Pat Krol of Emmanuel Music accepted the award and read a statement on his behalf:

“I want to thank Choral Arts New England for this prestigious award. I'm sorry my health does not allow me to be at this gathering today. I'm deeply honored by this award and honored to be in such distinguished company. Many of the previous recipients were colleagues—Blanche Moise, Don Teeters, and Dan Pinkham—and I treasure my years studying with Lorna Cooke De Varon.

“Choral music is an important part of New England culture. We are lucky in this part of the world having great choruses doing great music, but mostly we treasure the large number of sophisticated choral singers who have made our lives richer in the pursuit of this great literature.”

This year Choral Arts New England honors David Hoose for his exceptional service to choral music and to the New England choral community. The award was presented by Choral Arts New England Chair Peter Pulsifer in a ceremony on Sunday, October 19, 2008, at All Saints Parish in Brookline, Mass.

David Hoose, 2008 recipient of the Alfred Nash Patterson Lifetime Achievement Award, has been Music Director of the Cantata Singers & Ensemble since 1982. For 26 years he has inspired singers and audiences with his passion for creating music that makes people think about important social and personal issues. He has said that “choral music, especially serious choral music, and even more, serious sacred choral music, is confrontational. Music is not here to please or to make us feel good. Nor is it here to soothe or to respond to our specific needs. … Its power lies not in giving answers, but in asking questions. And in order to ask searching questions so that we might have a chance of answering them for ourselves, the music must be of a high order.”

Under his leadership, the ensemble has commissioned significant works for chorus and orchestra by John Harbison, Donald Sur, Peter Child, Andy Vores, Andrew Imbrie, T.J. Anderson and James Primosch, Stephen Hartke, and Lior Navok, and has greatly broadened its repertoire to embrace large works of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, as well the music that formed the roots of the organization—Bach and Schütz.

Mr. Hoose is known for innovative programming that often blends old and new compositions in a way that shows the relationship between composers and their music, spanning ages and cultures. Recent Cantata Singers seasons have been dedicated to (though not limited to) a single composer—Kurt Weill, and, currently, Benjamin Britten—giving in-depth insight that composer's world. Such holistic programming is a trademark, also seen, for example, in the “Slavery Documents” series, which includes both established and newly-commissioned works influenced by issues of human slavery, from the Civil War to the 1704 Deerfield Massacre to the Holocaust.

His singers know Mr. Hoose as meticulous and exacting in rehearsals, with a fierce sense of how every phrase should be sung and the determination to express the music as it should be. (His approach is the same in orchestral music, but with the chorus he applies the same rigor to the text.) He expects every singer to be as fully committed to making music as he is. These demanding, sometimes frustrating rehearsals lead in performance to passionate conducting that draws out every ounce of meaning in the music, an exhilarating experience for singers and audiences alike.

Mr. Hoose is also Music Director of Collage New Music and is Professor of Music and Director of Orchestral Activities at the Boston University School of Music. In 2005, he received the Alice M. Ditson Conductors Award in recognition of his commitment to the performance of American music. As a horn player, he was a founding member of the Emmanuel Wind Quintet.

More information about David Hoose and the Cantata Singers can be found at cantatasingers.org

This year Choral Arts New England honors Richard Coffey for his exceptional service to choral music and to the New England choral community.  The award was presented by former Choral Arts New England Chair Peter Pulsifer in a ceremony on Sunday, October 18, 2009, at Center Church in Hartford, Conn.

Richard Coffey, 2009 recipient of the Alfred Nash Patterson Lifetime Achievement Award, is founder and Artistic Director of CONCORA, a professional ensemble he founded in 1974 and which is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year. Leading a professional choral ensemble of over 50 members that continues to flourish after such a time is a rare and remarkable achievement in itself.

CONCORA performs a comprehensive choral repertoire year-round throughout southern New England both in its own subscription concerts and in collaboration with area orchestras, schools, and colleges. It has released eight compact discs, including one of Bach motets, a sacred sampler, and a collection of the choral works of Ned Rorem.

Mr. Coffey has given CONCORA strong community roots. It engages the community through frequent open sings, through joining with non-professional singers for performances of large-scale choral works, through its outreach groups such as CONCORA-to-Go, and by direct educational programs. These efforts involve singers of all ages, including high school and college students and adults, and also bring choral singing into the region's elementary schools and public libraries. CONCORA has been called “the nucleus of choral music in Connecticut:” its outstanding performances show audiences the beauty of choral music, and its members share their abilities as choir directors, teachers and soloists throughout the area.

In addition to CONCORA, Richard Coffey has served since April 2005 as Music Director of The Hartford Chorale, the principal chorus performing with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. In his long and active career, he has prepared choruses for many orchestras and festivals including Orchestra New England, the Springfield (Mass.) Symphony, the Bard Music Festival, and the Harkness Summer Music Festival. He was chorusmaster for the Connecticut Opera Association from 1988 until 1993. He has also served on the faculties of Hartt School, University of Hartford, SummerTerm at Central Connecticut State University, President's College of the University of Hartford, the Colby Church Music Institute in Maine and the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

Richard Coffey is Organist and Minister of Music of the South Church of New Britain, where he conducts a choir of professional and amateur singers and serves as Artistic Director of its Music Series, which annually presents concerts by visiting artists.

Mr. Coffey also gives generously to the music community. He has served on the boards of directors of the New Britain Symphony, the Hartford Chapter, American Guild of Organists, and Chorus America. He also serves region-wide as adjudicator and clinician for keyboard and choral competitions and festivals.

Mr. Coffey holds degrees in music from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the School of Sacred Music of New York's Union Theological Seminary. He was awarded France's “premier prix” in organ performance, following studies with organist Marie-Claire Alain in 1979. In 1992, he was named Choral Director of the Year by the Connecticut Chapter of the American Choral Directors Association.

Jameson Marvin, 2010 recipient of the Alfred Nash Patterson Lifetime Achievement Award, was for 32 years—until his retirement this year—director of choral activities at Harvard University, where he directed the all-male Harvard Glee Club, the all-female Radcliffe Choral Society, and the mixed-gender Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, as well as the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus, a 180-voice mixed-voice group that is open to non-students which he created in 1979. (The groups are known collectively as the Holden Choral Ensembles). As a Senior Lecturer on Music at Harvard, he taught musicology and choral conducting, and his students have gone on to lead major choruses throughout the country. He is beloved at Harvard for having nurtured a strong choral community built on a foundation of artistic excellence.

Under his direction, the Holden choruses achieved a national reputation for quality, performing demanding choral works from the small scale to symphonic. His choruses have made nearly a dozen appearances at conventions of the American Choral Directors Association, including six national conventions. Known among his peers for the depth of his knowledge, he is celebrated by his singers for the passion and unique level of engagement he inspires at rehearsals and in performance.

Jim Marvin introduced a new generation—thousands of students in his long tenure—to the excitement of great choral music, both old classics and new or rarely-heard masterpieces. As a director, he inspired his singers to reach for excellence; as an educator, he gave them the means to achieve it. Many in the New England choral community have enjoyed his performances and sung in his choruses. All of us continue to benefit as the singers he has inspired and the scholars he has trained join us outside the University gates.

A California native, Dr. Marvin received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Illinois, a Master of Arts from Stanford University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Music Composition from the University of California, Santa Barbara.. His academic specialty is the music of the Renaissance.

John Oliver, 2011 recipient of the Alfred Nash Patterson Lifetime Achievement Award, recently celebrated his 40th anniversary as conductor of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which he founded at the request of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to be their official chorus. Through his active development and advocacy, the chorus has become one of the premiere symphonic choruses in the world, praised for its performances in a wide variety of repertoire, including not just large symphonic and operatic works but also smaller works both accompanied and a cappella. The TFC has been featured on more than forty commercial recordings with the BSO and the Boston Pops, including three of the four initial releases on the symphony's recently-launched label, BSO Classics. One of those, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, won a 2010 Grammy award. Recently, BSO Classics released a collection of recordings of TFC unaccompanied performances at Tanglewood.

The TFC exposes audiences to choral music at the highest level, including some that is very hard to produce without the resources of a major orchestra. Through performances with the orchestra, the chorus reaches musically literate audiences that might not otherwise attend a choral concert—a positive experience that encourages those listeners to seek out more choral music. In addition, BSO commissions for the TFC (including, recently, William Bolcom's Eighth Symphony and James McMillan's St. John Passion) have broadened the choral-orchestral repertory. The growing success of the chorus has enabled the BSO to increasingly include the TFC in the programming, marketing, and identity of the orchestra—perhaps uniquely so among major symphonies.

Those accomplishments reflect both John's skill in training the chorus and his ability to recruit many of the best singers in the area—no mean feat in Boston's highly competitive choral environment, particularly for an ensemble with no paid singers. With about 250 members, the TFC includes many singers, teachers, choral directors and members of other singing groups from throughout New England. Those members bring the inspiration and the knowledge they gain from the TFC to their own choirs and students, thus enriching the greater choral community.

John Oliver obtained his first church-choir directing position at age eleven and went on to lead numerous ensembles of all ages and backgrounds, including the Framingham Choral Society and, from 1977–1996, his own John Oliver Chorale, which performed and recorded a wide-ranging repertoire that included many neglected masterworks and notable compositions by living composers.

A distinguished educator as well as a conductor, John Oliver served on the faculty of the Tanglewood Music Center for 20 years and on the faculty of MIT for 32 years. Through his teaching and personal inspiration he has had a major impact on musical life in New England and beyond. He has enriched the lives not just of the countless students, fellows and singers whom he has directed but of all the musical community.

Sonja Dahlgren Pryor, 2012 recipient of the Alfred Nash Patterson Lifetime Achievement Award, recently celebrated her 50th anniversary as Music Director of Chorus North Shore in Rockport, Massachusetts. Ms. Pryor’s charismatic personality and passion for musical excellence have developed this community chorus, which itself just completed its eightieth season, into a leading arts organization on Boston’s North Shore, performing choral masterworks with orchestra and internationally known soloists and embarking on regular concert tours abroad.

A large ensemble open to all without audition, Chorus North Shore brings together singers of all ability levels and ages to learn and perform great choral works at a high artistic level. Under Ms. Pryor’s leadership, the chorus regularly performs the challenging works of Mozart, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Handel, Stravinsky, Bernstein, and others for large and appreciative North Shore audiences. In 2005, the group created the Chorus North Shore Honors Youth Choir, a fully auditioned choir for youth age ten through high school which performs both on its own and as a featured performer with Chorus North Shore.

Music has been “Sunny” Pryor’s lifelong calling. At age 15 she was already conducting the Junior Choir at her local church in Detroit, Michigan while also singing in three different choruses. She later earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in voice from Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts and a Master of Sciences degree in Music Education from the University of New Hampshire. Ms. Pryor has studied under Robert Shaw, Frank Battisti, Robert Page, and Margaret Hillis of the Chicago Symphony Chorus. She has attended the Aspen Music Festival and the Adirondack Festival of Music and has conducted workshops in Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, and Michigan.

Ms. Pryor has been associated with music education for over 30 years. She has taught music to students from kindergarten through college. She served as Director of Music of the Hamilton-Wenham school district in Massachusetts and has taught at the University of New Hampshire, Gordon College, and Northern Essex Community College. She is often a guest lecturer at colleges and universities, and has lectured at the New England Conservatory for the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Ms. Pryor has been a church choir director in Michigan and Massachusetts, including Director of Choral Music at the Park Street Church in Boston. She is an active member of Chorus America and The American Choral Directors Association, and also serves on the Board of the Cuvilly Arts & Education Center in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

For her valuable contributions to music and music education, Ms. Pryor has been recognized by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as an Outstanding Massachusetts Arts Educator. In 1999, she received the Walker Hancock Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities.

E. Wayne Abercrombie, 2013 recipient of the Alfred Nash Patterson Lifetime Achievement Award, is a noted conductor, clinician and workshop facilitator with extensive experience working with singers and students at all levels.Professor Emeritus of Music and former Director of Choral Activities at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Dr. Abercrombie retired in May 2007 after 33 years in the Department of Music. He succeeded Alan Harler as Director of the Madrigal Singers in 1974, founded the University Chamber Choir in 1978, and became Director of the University Chorale in 2000.

Choirs under Dr. Abercrombie’s direction have toured the Eastern Seaboard and in Europe. His appearances as guest conductor include festival choruses and orchestras throughout New England, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri and Pennsylvania, as well as the Five College Orchestra, the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, and both of its youth orchestras. His third appearance as conductor of the Massachusetts All-State Chorus was in 2007. He has lectured, conducted clinics, taught in and served as consultant to colleges, high schools and churches, and at conferences of the American Guild of Organists, the Music Educators National Conference, and the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA). He served on the Executive Boards of the Conductors Guild and the Massachusetts Music Educators Association.

He has served on the state, division and national boards of the ACDA, as President of the Massachusetts chapter, and as President of the Eastern Division from 2004 to 2006. In 2007 he was named Massachusetts ACDA Conductor of the Year. He is chair of the Steering Committee for the Conducting Master Class at the ACDA Eastern Division 2014 Conference with Simon Carrington.

Dr. Abercrombie is a co-founder (in 2007) and current Artistic Director of the Children's Chorus of Springfield(Mass.), and helped to establish the International Federation of Choral Music's program Conductors Without Borders. Since retirement, he has been guest conductor or lecturer at Amherst College, Boston University, Northeastern University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (where he was made an Honorary Member of the Men’s Glee Club), and Western New England University. He continues to research new approaches in teaching conducting and in discovering how conductors learn their craft, and was an observer at the Eric Ericson Masterclass 2011 in Haarlem, The Netherlands.

Dr. Abercrombie holds degrees from Westminster Choir College, (B.M. in Voice and M.M. in Conducting), and Indiana University (D. Mus. in Choral Conducting with Highest Honors). He has been Assistant Conductor and Chorus Director of the Johnstown (Pa.), Elkhart (Ind.) and Springfield (Mass.) Symphony Orchestra Choruses. He taught and conducted at West Georgia College and Indiana University at South Bend, has taught voice and sung recitals and solos with orchestra, and was a member of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chamber Chorus under Robert Shaw.

Dr. Gerald R. Mack, 2014 recipient of the Alfred Nash Patterson Lifetime Achievement Award, is a nationally-known conductor, educator, and mentor. He was conductor of the Worcester Chorus in Massachusetts for 28 years (1977–2005), founder and leader for 15 years (1995–2000) of the Great Waters Music Festival in Wolfeboro, NH, and Director of Choral Activities and a faculty member for 27 years at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, Connecticut. After retiring to Nantucket in 1999, he became the Executive Director of the Nantucket Community Music Center; he later established theNantucket Art Council's highly successful winter concert series. The Worcester Chorus established a scholarship in his name in 2010.

Dr. Mack has worked with Gunther Schuller, Yehudi Menuin, Michael Lancaster, Seiji Ozawa, and Aaron Copland, among others. His choruses have performed at Carnegie Hall, Tully Hall, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Jordan Hall, and Washington’s National Cathedral, as well as at many of the great concert halls of Europe. He has conducted at the New York Mostly Mozart Festival, the Salzburg Music Festival, the International Dubrovnik Music Festival, and the Oaxaca Spring Festival (with the Mexican National Symphony).

A dedicated educator with a deep commitment to colleagues and students, Dr. Mack has a national reputation as an adjudicator, lecturer, clinician and guest conductor. His high school choirs appeared at numerous MENC conventions (of the National Association for Music Education). In 1961, his school chorus was invited to represent the U.S. at the International Music Educators’ Convention in Vienna. His Hartt choral groups were frequently selected to appear at American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) conventions throughout the U.S., and he conducted many All State and Divisional Festival Choruses. While at Hartt, he organized and hosted the first ACDA Eastern Division Convention.

One product of his involvement with the Connecticut Commission on the Arts was the Greater Hartford Youth Chorale, which Dr. Mack and his wife organized for the first annual Hartford Arts Festival. That initiative became an ongoing program which continued for 10 years, providing special musical opportunities for suburban and inner-city young people from 22 high schools in the Hartford area.

Dr. Mack has degrees in Music Education and choral conducting from the University of New York at Fredonia (bachelors) and from Columbia University (masters and doctorate).