Greetings!
It has given me great pleasure to serve our SCMEA Choral Division in the role of president. I continue to be thankful for our choral music education community in South Carolina. I especially want to thank our committee chairs, committee members, webmaster, and treasurer. Each of these individuals puts in time for no gain of their own except to provide opportunities, experiences, and support for the choral directors and choral students in our state. Your service does not go unnoticed or unappreciated.
We have been working like mad to continue to provide more for our choral division! We will kick things off with Choral Arts on September 6-7, 2025 with Dr. Jeremy Mims as our clinician. Dr. Mims is Director of Choral Activities at Winthrop University. He comes with a wealth of knowledge and interaction within our community as a clinician, judge, conductor of SCMEA performing choirs, and so much more! Most importantly, he is a passionate, talented music educator that gets that we are all better when we each share our best with each other. We would love to see our future music educators currently in college/university present as well!
Throughout the year, please, continue to visit us at our website to see event information, important dates and to register for events. We have so many things to participate in— High School All-State, Middle School and High School Choral Performance Assessment, Region Choir, Middle School Clinic which offers SSA, TTB, and 6th grade options, and Solo & Ensemble. We had record participation across the board at events this past year and only want to continue to reach students through these impactful events.
Lastly, we are very excited about the potential of our SCMEA Choral Division conference offerings on February 6-8, 2025. We have been fighting to keep up with our growth as a division by securing more performance spaces, brainstorming and planning in order to feature more choirs as well as more variety of choirs, and including more sessions for each attendee. These will be finalized at our SCMEA Executive Board and Conference Planning Meeting.
We are also very excited about our headliner– Dr. Jason Max Ferdinand. It is impossible to sing his praises enough. We will experience two sessions and a reading session. One session allows selected members of our choral community the opportunity to lead and conduct with feedback on gesture and achieving the ideal sound. His choirs have been featured at numerous national and international events with his collegiate choir being winners of The World Choir Games and his professional choir being featured at BBC Proms! Dr. Ferdinand has been a headliner for all of the major choral conferences in the USA.
We cannot wait to see each of you and, please, be in touch!
With sincere gratitude,
Maurice Burgess