We are honored to welcome Grammy Award-winning coductor Jerry Blackstone.

The guest clinician for the 2010 Lee & Betty Kjelson Distinguished Choral Scholars Residency is Grammy Award-winning conductor Jerry Blackstone, Director of Choirs and Chair of the Conducting Department at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance, where he conducts the Chamber Choir, teaches conducting at the graduate level, and administers a choral program of eleven choirs. In February 2006, he received two Grammy Awards (“Best Choral Performance” and “Best Classical Album”) as chorusmaster for the critically acclaimed Naxos recording of William Bolcom’s monumental Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

In 2006, the Chamber Choir performed by special invitation at the inaugural convention of the National Collegiate Choral Organization in San Antonio, and in 2003, the Chamber Choir presented three enthusiastically received performances in New York City at the National Convention of the American Choral Directors Association. In addition to Professor Blackstone’s choral conducting work, he has led operatic productions with the University of Michigan Opera Theatre, including productions of Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen and Strauss’s Die Fledermaus.