Urbandale Singers Win Distinction of 'Note' for Spring Choral Directors' Conference

The Urbandale Singers, the concert choir at Urbandale High School, has received the prestigious distinction of serving as a demonstration choir at the 2014 North Central American Choral Directors Association Conference next March in Des Moines

The concert choir’s selection was based on the breadth and depth of skills, consistency in performance excellence and the ability to connect with a variety of audiences, Iowa Living Magazines reports.

Ted Brimeyer, the vocal music director at Urbandale High School, said the choir’s selection is a “notable accomplishment.” The North Central Division of the ACDA, a nonprofit music education organization, has more than 3,000 members, including choirs and conductors throughout Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

“Being selected as a demonstration choir for … conference is a great honor that recognizes consistency in excellent choral singing based on the past three years of recordings of our choir,” Brimeyer said. “Many thanks to the Urbandale Singers from fall 2010 through spring 2013 for their efforts in helping us achieve this notable accomplishment.”

The theme of the 2014 conference is “Celebrating Choral Diversity –our many songs, our many paths, our many voices.”

“We will seek to attend, examine, honor, and celebrate diversity in the choral art in all the ways that it occurs, and in all the ways that it gives variety, interest, inclusiveness, accessibility, relevance, vitality, and strength to our choral community,” the organization’s president, James Kinchen of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, said on the group’s web site. “This includes the construction of ‘diversity’ – racial, ethnic, and cultural – that most obviously and immediately comes to mind. As a multicultural nation within a global community, we are challenged to expand our horizons – the canons of our literature, the diversity of our performance practices, the inclusiveness of our choirs, the cultural sensitivity of our pedagogy, the demographics of our audiences – in ways that will better reflect these realities.”