I am very excited to be working with Professor Christine Howlett on this project! Here is a link to the proposed project. https://ford.vassar.edu/projects/2019/musi-howlett.html Here is the link to the summer choral festival that we will be working with. http://www.cappellafestiva.org/dbpage.php?pg=summer_festival

Ford Scholar report summer 2019 

This summer I had the honor of working under the Ford Scholar program with professor Christine Howlett. Our original project was Choral music–research, program planning, and teaching. However, over the course of the summer, my work and research expanded to a variety of topics. At the beginning of our program, we focused on planning the Cappella Festiva Summer Choral Festival. Unfortunately, due to a lack of enrolment, the festival had to be canceled. Howlett and I then began to search for the reason that very few people registered their children for the summer festival. We also worked to develop a new format for the program which hopefully will appeal to parents, teachers, and children for summer 2020. While it was very disappointing to have to cancel the summer festival, I believe I learned a lot from the experience and I am excited about the future of the festival.

In addition to working on the Summer Choral Festival project, I helped Howlett and music department faculty Eduardo Navega begin planning a summer program for both choral and orchestral conducting to be hosted at Vassar College. This program will hopefully take place in the summer of 2020. We hope to attract undergraduate, graduate, and budding professional students from all over the country to come and learn from our faculty and distinguished guests. I am very thankful for this opportunity and I look forward to the success of the programs.