Bryan Helsel, Ph.D
Application materials for Duquesne University’s posting for Assistant Professor of Choral Music Education are below.
I am truly excited for the opportunity to apply for this position, and I feel that I can bring a great deal of experience, connections, and skills to grow the program, recruit students, and modernize the curriculum. I state those items in greater detail in my cover letter, which can be viewed here.
My curriculum vitae is attached at this link. There you can view my past employment and many accomplishments in choral music education and music in general.
Here are links to scholarly writing examples.
Scholarly writing 1: To Tour or Not to Tour, Published by the Journal of Excellence in Arts Research
Scholarly writing 2: Can You Spare some Change? - a music education thought experiment
Scholarly writing 3: A Historical look at Sight-singing in the choral classroom
Scholarly writing 4: Two short articles that were published in the PMEA News Journal when I was the state choral representative
Audio and Video content
I was a successful high school choral director for 26 years, but I do not currently have access to a choir for rehearsal videos. While guest conducting, it did not seem appropriate to set up a camera, so instead I will provide the following.
The first clip is the Butler Choirs performing Fauré’s Requiem. Every other year, I would raise funds to hire an orchestra and give these students an opportunity to perform choral masterworks. Among them were Rutter’s Gloria and Magnificat, Steve Dobrogosz’s Mass, Joe Negri’s Mass of Hope (performed with Joe), Mozart’s Requiem, Vivaldi’s Gloria, the Holocaust Cantata, and others.
The next clip demonstrates how I combined my interests in choral music education and music technology as a means of keeping choral performances alive during the pandemic. Creating this 45-minute concert was a tremendous amount of work collaborating with students from my home to theirs, recording them, and synchronizing everyone’s performance. As the concert progresses, you can see me getting better at video editing. It was difficult to get full participation and to maintain quality, but we kept music going during that difficult time.
Hoping to make up for lacking a rehearsal video, here are several recordings of my choirs over the years. These first five are from my guest conducting the PMEA District 5 choir in 2024. “Celebrate My Joy” is a piece I wrote for these students. During Thursday’s rehearsal, I gave them a writing prompt asking what PMEA means to them. That evening in the hotel, I transformed their responses into lyrics, printed the music and taught it the next day, in order to perform it in the concert that evening. The song became a special anthem for those students, who continue to write to me about it. It helped me recruit students for YSU, and I’m sure events like this will do the same for Duquesne.
The next three are pieces I wrote for my high school choirs. Seeing how affected my students were on September 11, 2001, I wrote “The Mourning After” for them on September 12. “Hark Now” is a rousing holiday piece using 5/4 and mixed meter. “Graduation Song” is one that I wrote collaboratively with the students that sparked a decade long tradition of student composition as their senior farewell song.
These next two pieces were from one of the times when my Treble Choir was invited to perform at the PMEA state conference.
Additional recordings are here from masterworks and other past performances.
Bonus content
As an educator and conductor, I think it is crucial to engage in continuing education for myself. I attend conducting workshops in the summer as often as possible; I take voice and piano lessons to make sure my technique is as solid as possible. The first video below is a conducting example from the weeklong conducting workshop at Temple University, Temple Sings. My photo even made the brochure the following year!
Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to speaking with you.
My contact information is below.
Bryan Helsel
412-779-1422
bryanhelsel@yahoo.com
103 Dogwood Ct.
Butler, PA 16001