Hello!
My name is Katie O’Connor-Ballantyne, and I’m one of your friendly neighborhood moderators here on Directing Across Distance.
Most recently, I’ve been an Associate Choral Editor at Alfred Music, but I’ve also served as the Artistic Director of the Ithaca Children & Youth Chorus (2016-2019), an Aural Skills and Music Theory professor at Ithaca College (2016-2019), and an active composer, choral clinician, and adjudicator throughout the United States. You can find quite a bit of my music here at my website.
What attracts me to Directing Across Distance: I am always interested in the many ways we can continue to push the envelope of the choral art. Compositionally, I’m working on some drafts that may actually work (and sound good!) within a low-latency audio environment. As an educator, I’m concerned with the ways we preserve that vital sense of choral community while face-to-face rehearsal is a high-risk option. Interpersonally, I always enjoy “talking shop” with other choral musicians – it’s one of the things I’ve missed most during COVID-19. Under normal circumstances I would have been giving reading sessions and choral clinics all over the US this summer!
Please feel free to ask me questions, flag me down for help, or just reach out – I look forward to getting to know you!