The Student National Association of Teachers of Singing will host a 12-hour symposium open to the public from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday at the Simon Music Center M015. SNATS is a student organization that aims to assist students in learning about the relationship between teaching and singing. IU’s chapter of SNATS hosts two major events annually, the faculty cabaret and the New Voice Educators Symposium this weekend.
The symposium will feature a variety of guests, including Jacobs School of Music alumnus Jeremy Weiss. First year doctoral student Ray Hootman is SNATS’ vice president for the 2024-25 school year. Her main responsibility has been planning the symposium, which has been in development since September of last year.
Weiss will present with his compositional partner Nicole Brancato. The two are creating a chamber opera, and plan to discuss collaboration, psychology and artificial intelligence in their presentation.
“Our hope is that attendees come away with new ways of thinking about their own artistic practices, and a curiosity to discover for themselves that ineffable space of discovery, dialogue and unexpected creative alchemy that is born from collaborative creativity,.” Brancato said.
SNATS chooses an annual theme; this year’s is “Singer of All Trades,” a play on jack-of-all-trades, to highlight the multidisciplinary nature of a career in music as a performer, teacher, social media influencer or entrepreneur.
“It's highlighting all of those different voices and perspectives and hopefully teaching new voice educators how to kind of navigate this field, especially because we come from a performance background for a lot of us,” Hootman said.
Music school associate professor in voice Samantha Joy Whitaker will give a presentation on Latin American art songs.
“The goal is to share as much information as possible without it feeling jarring that you listen to me talk for 30 minutes and that you're like, ‘Okay, now where do I look?’” Whitaker said. “So, with each slide that I've created, there's a QR code that will take you to a separate page that has all the links there ready for you, so hopefully that'll make it a little easier for students to see.”
While Whitaker was pursuing her undergraduate degree at University of Texas at El Paso, she was involved with the school’s chapter of SNATS. She said she appreciated the focus of the event this year, as the expectation when studying music is that one will either be a performer or a teacher.
“I think at some point, we'll all perform, and then definitely at some point we'll all be teachers,” Whitaker said. “But we also have a lot of other strengths that can be lent to a multitude of different disciplines, and that's what this symposium will be.”
While the symposium is catered toward amplifying those studying voice, whether that be performance or education, it is still open to all, and anyone is invited to attend no matter what their field of study is.
“It’ll be a great way to meet new people and also hopefully learn some stuff at the same time,” Hootman said. “We're talking about the multidisciplinary nature of this, we have a presentation on how to use social media to amplify your voice or the mindfulness. It's like, there's so much that relates especially to us as musicians, but everyone can take those little nuggets.”
