Dr. Lindsay Pope, Director of Choral Activities
Dr. Lindsay Pope is Director of Choral Activities at UMass Amherst, where she directs the Chamber Choir and teaches conducting. Previously, she directed the programs at Mount Holyoke College and Williams College. She was also Assistant Conductor of the Dallas Symphony Chorus, for which her work was praised as “exemplary and well-prepared” (Texas Classical Review).
From 2011 to 2016, Dr. Pope was Director of Choral Ensembles and Lecturer in Music at Mount Holyoke College. Under her direction, the ensembles participated in tours to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, released a commercial CD, and performed at the American Choral Directors Association’s 2016 Eastern Division Conference.
Dr. Pope has served as Reading and Standards Chair for Women’s Choirs for Massachusetts ACDA. She is a choral clinician for children’s choruses and district choirs, thus far in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Dr. Pope is passionate about exposing her students to choral music from a variety of genres, eras, and particularly cultures. She has traveled to Corsica and the Republic of Georgia with Village Harmony to study and perform traditional folk song and chant.
Dr. Pope is a mezzo-soprano specializing in early music. At the University of North Texas, she sang as a soloist in Bach St. John Passion and Abendmusik at the Boston Early Music Festival. Other notable solo performances include the Duruflé Requiem on the Dallas Symphony Chorus’s Scando-Baltic Tour and Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, conducted by Joseph Flummerfelt, at the Spoleto USA Festival. She currently sings with Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Grammy-affiliated True Concord Voices, and Handel + Haydn Society Chorus.
Dr. Pope’s research interests include early music performance practice, the ethics of choral programming, and the intersection of women and gender studies with choral music. Her articles on women’s choirs, female composers, and sacred music in secular cultures have been featured in Massachusetts ACDA newsletters and on the Northwest ACDA website. Her dissertation entitled “Beyond the Binary: The Intersection of Gender and Cross-Cultural Identity in Reena Esmail’s Life and Choral Works” was honored with North Texas’s Toulouse Dissertation Award in the Fine Arts field and received the Julius Herford Dissertation Prize for outstanding doctoral terminal research in choral music.
Dr. Pope holds degrees from the University of North Texas (Doctor of Musical Arts, Choral Conducting), Westminster Choir College (Master of Music, Choral Conducting), and Mount Holyoke College (Bachelor of Arts, Music). While a student at Mount Holyoke, she directed the V-8’s, the nation’s oldest continuing female a cappella group.
Lindsay lives in Williamsburg, Massachusetts with her husband, Jonathan, her child, Heron, two dogs, and a cat. She co-runs with her husband Yoga Sanctuary, a yoga studio and wellness space in Northampton. In her free time, she loves hiking, creative writing, eating good food, and practicing yoga.
Dr. Stephen A. Paparo, Associate Professor
Music Education/Choral Specialist
Dr. Stephen A. Paparo is Associate Professor of Music Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and conductor of the University Chorale. He holds degrees from Michigan State University (Ph.D.), Syracuse University (M.M.), and Ithaca College (B.M.), and is a Guild Certified Practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education. As a former public school teacher, he taught junior and senior high school choral music for ten years in New Hartford, New York, and earned National Board Certification in 2002.
Active as a guest conductor, Dr. Paparo has conducted honor and festival choirs at all levels in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. He has presented at international, national, and state conferences, including the International Symposium on Performance Science (Kyoto, Japan), The Phenomenon of Singing International Symposium (St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada), Suncoast Music Education Research Symposium (Tampa, FL), and at two American Choral Directors Association Eastern Division Conferences. He has served on the board of the Massachusetts chapter for the American Choral Directors Association as Student Activities chair (2012-2017), as President (2017-2020), and currently as Past-President (2020-2023).
His research interests include the application of the Feldenkrais Method to singing instruction in the choral setting, non-traditional choral ensembles, such as contemporary collegiate a cappella, virtual choirs, and circle singing groups, and LGBTQ studies in music education. He is published in the Bulletin for the Council of Research in Music Education, International Journal of Music Education, and Music Education Research. His chapter “Voicing with Awareness: An Introduction to the Feldenkrais Method” appears in Somatic voice: From practice to praxis, published by Routledge, and his chapter “Circle singing: Composing Improvisation and Improvising Composition” is published in Musicianship: Composing in Choir, published by GIA. His compositions, “Sing in Harmony!” and “A Musical Pun-ology”, for beginning choirs are published by Alfred Music.