Joan Szymko

Joan Szymko is widely regarded as an outstanding composer of choral music in America today. With a catalog of over 100 choral works in print, her music is sung regularly at choral festivals and competitions across North America and abroad and for nearly two decades has been heard on stage or in sessions at every National Conference of the American Choral Director’s Association. The ACDA recognized Szymko’s lasting impact on the choral arts in North America by selecting her as a recipient of the prestigious Raymond W. Brock Memorial Commission in 2010. Szymko has composed for professional, church, LGBTQ, children’s and all manner of academic and community choirs. Her 2016 commissioned oratorio, Shadow and Light, a major new addition to the repertoire for chorus and orchestra, shines a compassionate light on the suffering of those journeying through life with Alzheimer’s dementia.

Szymko’s embodied approach to sound, dedication to craft, and insistence on quality texts— all relate to her focus as a conductor and are reflected in her choral compositions. Her settings do not have a readily recognizable, “sound” but consistently display a discerning, insightful marriage of words and music. Her primary intention is to always illuminate and magnify the words she sets.

Joan lives and works in Portland, Oregon in the beautiful Pacific Northwest . She serves as Artistic Director emerita for Aurora Chorus, which she led for 26 years. A dynamic conductor, Joan workshops her music with choirs in a variety of educational and festival settings across the country and abroad.