Rediscovering Joy: Boundaries, Balance, and the Long Career

Dr. Ryan Board and Dr. Jaclyn Normandie

LIVE Zoom Class TUESDAY, June 9th

4:30pm PST // 6:30pm CST // 7:30pm EST

“Rediscovering Joy: Boundaries, Balance, and the Long Career”

Choral directors are a tired community. Today's teachers are asked to support a new kind of student, and learning healthy boundaries may well decide the future of our musical community. This session offers specific, measurable strategies to reduce anxiety that attendees can put to use immediately. Drawing on a thread of wisdom that humanity has rediscovered across cultures and centuries, from the Stoics to the Buddhist tradition, we will explore the delicate balance between servanthood and self-care so that joy can be sustained across a lifelong career. When directors tend their own well-being first, they are far better able to bring the music, the students, and the community together. You are not limitless, and you were never meant to be. Come learn how to fill the cup you pour from.

You will learn:

A practical, in-the-moment tool for regulating anxiety when a rehearsal goes sideways, grounded in current neuroscience.
The difference between healthy servanthood and self-erasure, and how to hold boundaries with students, parents, and administrators without guilt.
A daily, repeatable practice for cultivating joy, built like a warm-up you already know how to run.
A reminder of why ensemble music endures: the one thing technology can never replicate.

WATCH MASTERCLASS

Meet Your Professors

Dr. Ryan Board:

Ryan Board, Director of Choral Activities at Pepperdine University, garners international attention as a conductor, choral artist, teacher, and clinician. At Pepperdine he directs the Concert Choir and Chamber Choir and teaches conducting, music history, and music education, with research focused on rhetoric and affections in sacred vocal music of the Baroque era.

Dr. Board maintains an active schedule as a professional singer, presenter, and conductor. From 2014 to 2020 he was Principal Conductor for the Prague Choral Festival, and he has collaborated with or prepared choirs for Anton Armstrong, Simon Carrington, Joseph Flummerfelt, Andrew Megill, André Thomas, Stewart Copeland of The Police, and Charles Bruffy and the Kansas City Chorale, among many others. An avid conductor of choral-orchestral literature, he has led works ranging from Bach's St. John Passion to Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw. Choirs under his direction have performed at regional and national conventions of the American Choral Directors Association, the Prague Choral Festival, and the Piccolo Spoleto Festival.

Early in his career he taught public school choral music in Idaho and served as associate music director for the World Vision Youth Ambassador Program, conducting in more than 18 countries. His degrees are from the University of Northern Colorado, Westminster Choir College, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where his primary teachers were Galen Darrough, Andrew Megill, Joseph Flummerfelt, and Scott Anderson.

Dr. Jaclyn Normandie Bio:

Dr. Jaclyn Normandie is a conductor, voice specialist, and presence mentor with over 25 years of experience coaching thousands of people across podiums, performance halls, and C-suites. She holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan, has served on the faculties of the University of Tennessee Knoxville and Oakland University, and has presented at ACDA and over twenty national and regional conferences.

She is the author of The Mindful Musician: Finding a Healthy Balance and the founder of Modern Academies, the parent organization of the Modern Conducting Academy, Modern Vocal Academy, Modern Choral Academy, and CEO SoundLab. Her work integrates vocal pedagogy, conducting biomechanics, somatic regulation, and mindfulness, informed by training in karate (black belt), yoga, and meditation, with studies in China, India, Brazil, and Costa Rica.

Start Learning Today

JOIN MCA