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Interview with Margaret Winchell, Director of Choral Activities

Andy Draper: Welcome to Meadows on the Mic, the official podcast of the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. I'm your host, Andy Draper, part of the Meadows marketing team and podcaster extraordinaire. On this show, I'll be bringing you in-depth interviews with Meadows faculty, students and staff covering everything from events, special guests and anything else you need to know happening at SMU Meadows.

On this episode, I interviewed Professor Margaret Winchell, the new director of Choral Activities at SMU Meadows. Professor Winchell teaches courses in Choral Conducting and Literature and can lead several choral ensembles. Let's get to know her!

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Andy: Good afternoon. I'm Andy Draper. I'm with Meadows marketing and this is our inaugural episode of Meadows on the Mic. We're here with Professor Margaret Winchell, the new Director of Choral Activities at the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. Welcome!

Professor Margaret Winchell: Thank you! It's a pleasure to be here!

Andy: Absolutely glad to have you here! Now, we're just a couple of weeks into the school year. We've had a couple of rehearsals. What are your first impressions? How's it going so far?

MW: Oh gosh. I'm adjusting as much as I think the students are and there's a lot of new in Meadows this year – a lot of new faculty, me and an orchestra conductor and plenty of other people that I'm sure you'll talk to.

There's a lot of adjusting, but the thing that I've been really impressed by and glad and to see is that the students are both very talented and very warm. They're so helpful! They're so excited to be here and they have been bending over backwards to make sure that I have everything I need and that we can make something together in these rehearsals. It's been really encouraging even as it's been a wild ride.

Andy: Right, right! Well that's really wonderful! It's a great place to be, takes a little bit of adjusting to, you’ve got to figure out where to park and not get lost in the building. So, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background how you got into music?

MW: Yeah, so I grew up in Houston, Texas, and Texas is a great state for music education. I didn’t realize that until I left Texas and saw that not every state has as robust an education curriculum as Texas does. I started playing the piano when I was around four and a half or five years old. My sister was already playing, and the piano was a really attractive 'toy' to have in the house – this large instrument that makes big sounds. I’d watch her take lessons, and I thought, 'Wow, that seems cool, having this big, interactive toy.' So, I asked if I could take lessons too. It started from there, and it just felt…I don’t know, unlike other things that were so solitary, like doing a puzzle or reading. It didn’t force me to be super extroverted either, which was nice since I was kind of an ambivert.

Andy: Right, right.

MW: Yeah, but it started with piano, and then I picked up the French horn in fourth grade. I was really a band and orchestra kid all through middle school, high school and the start of college. I went to HSPVA in Houston and had a blast – they let me do a bit of both horn and piano. Somewhere along the way, I got to accompany some choirs and experience what accompanists do, which is a lot of problem-solving, right? You're there, you can hear where the issue is, and you might be able to fix it by helping the altos get that starting pitch – and that was really appealing to me.

Andy: And then how do you transition into voice and conductive?

MW: Yeah, that came later. I went to college and initially tried to do anything but music, because I was looking at my peers who were so focused on becoming solo performers, and I just didn’t have the patience for that. I couldn’t stand being alone in a practice room for hours, and I didn’t care enough about perfecting my excerpts. So I tried other things – I explored English and secondary education. I even considered pre-med and law.

Andy: Like a lot of students do, you know – just trying to figure it out.

MW: Yeah, exactly! Eventually, I was sitting on the floor of my freshman dorm room, trying to figure out how many majors I could manage in four years. But I realized that no matter how many I picked, the one thing I couldn’t imagine my college experience without was music. I was looking over the music education curriculum and I thought, ‘This all seems like stuff I’d want to do just for fun.’ Then it hit me – maybe the thing that seemed like it could just be for fun could actually be my career.

So, I switched to music education, starting with instrumental music ed. I was kicked out of orchestra in my second year though because there were so many dedicated horn majors who committed to lessons and intensive practice, and I didn’t quite have the patience for that. My sister was in choir, and I was singing in choir too, so I was really grateful when the director suggested choral music ed as a great fit. I didn’t get proper voice training until my master’s, which feels late compared to other choral conductors, so I think I came to singing relatively late. But what I found so compelling about choral music was the text – we get to work with words and poetry, which adds an entirely new dimension to the music we create.

Andy: Absolutely.

MW: As it also changes, you know, how composers write the music.

Andy: Right. It's a whole different dimension to the art form for sure. So kind of catching up, what drew you to SMU in this position?

MW: Yeah. I mean, several things. The first thing that comes to mind is that I hopped on this Zoom interview. And Ryan Cole is our audition instructor was in the Zoom call and everyone was introducing themselves. And I recognized his voice because we were in the same music class.

Andy: Oh, right. Right!

MW: We were writing at HSBJ and so I was like, oh my gosh, I know you. It's a friend.

Andy: Always helps!

MW: Yeah, and I remembered it all coming back to me. I thought, ‘Oh, he went to SMU, had a great experience, and is such a great musician.’ So, I was like, this is now very much on my radar; I know someone who went here, and therefore it seems like I could imagine myself here.

But you add to that, there is so much potential with the voices of the students, right? There's incredible talent, and so what you could make in a choral ensemble with that kind of raw potential is huge. So that was really appealing to me. I have some graduate students in choral conducting and the idea that I could teach conducting lessons in addition to conducting ensembles was really appealing to me. I'm really interested in how conductors become conductors and how we get better at all the things that conductors do. It's such a generalist's degree – it requires dipping your toes into so many different areas of music-making. So I think it was the people’s potential and the kind of balance of teaching activities that are on my plate.

Andy: Right. Well, that kind of leads me into the next area, which is teaching and pedagogy. And I wanted to get into what can students kind of expect from your teaching, your courses, what can they expect in rehearsal?

MW: Yeah, I love rehearsal. I think it is the place where all the stuff you learn in your other music classes, as well as all your other classes, comes together into a giant group project.

So, you know, you’re learning about big eras in music history in your music history classes. You’re learning about vocal pedagogy, music theory and the overtone series. And in your English class, you’re learning about interpreting a text. All of that then comes together in the ensemble, where we get to do it all collaboratively.

A lot of what I do in rehearsal is focused on exploring all the different angles from which we can look at the music. I ask students to think about why we sing Monteverdi differently from how we sing Barber, which are two composers we’re working with in Chamber Singers right now. Today, we were looking at this beautiful contrary motion in one of Barber's pieces that we’re doing, and he’s written dynamics in accordance with the way the voices widen and then narrow. We have to pay attention to that as singers and certainly as conductors. But I'm getting specific…

Andy: That’s ok!

MW: No, but it’s the place where we get to bring together all the stuff, we find everywhere else. I tend to be pretty high energy in rehearsal! I think it’s fun. So I try to have a lot of fun, and I hope the singers do too.

Maybe the last piece I’ll throw in is that conductors are nothing without singers. We wave our arms, and if they don’t sing, nothing happens. If there is no music, I am not the one who makes the sound. It’s really important to me that the people in the ensemble feel like equal collaborators in the music we’re making. They have opinions. They have instincts. They’re hearing different things than what I’m hearing. For all of us to be invested in the music we create together, it’s important that they feel their voice, their opinion and their musicality are valued. So I’m always looking for ways to give them a voice.

Andy: Right, both sides of the standard are important and can be a very collaborative thing.

You know, it’s only been a couple of weeks, but how have the students been so far? How are the first few rehearsals going?

MW: Yeah, they've been really warm and enthusiastic, as I’ve said. I've been reflecting on what we've been doing in rehearsal too, trying to shift us in new directions each week. My goal this week has been… you know, we’ve been learning the notes, and that’s important and great, and we have to do that…

Andy: Right, gotta do legwork!

MW: That's right! But this week, I kind of came in with this intention of it's time to actually make music with the things that we're singing. And I think it's a trap for conductors and for singers sometimes to think that all we're doing is executing what's on the page, being perfect little singing robots.

And that's NOT who we are, that's not what the music demands of us. And so this week, it feels like we've really been able to get into the music of the music. And they have responded really positively to that with just...

You forget sometimes if you get yourself into just sectional skirt for ages right, you can forget that actually it's beautiful and it's fun and if you actually hear how the soprano line interacts with the alto line like there's something that…

Andy: That changes everything.

MW: Yeah, and so you find your way into an actual moment of making something together and not just trying to get it right. The place we’re in right now is, I think, just the first little opening of really making music with each other and not just getting it right.

Andy: Right! Absolutely! My teacher used to say, 'Get out of school and start making music!' And that kind of leads me to my final question: What are some of your favorite choral works?

MW: This is a tricky question because the answer usually is “whatever I'm working on right now.” My job is to be excited, to figure out how to love the thing that I'm conducting, and then share that love with the people I'm making music with, right? Help them see why it's so great. So, from that perspective, my favorite piece right now is what's happening in rehearsal: Monteverdi and the Barber Reincarnations, there’s a Debussy art song arrangement with Concordia that we're doing, and a really cool Swedish two-part piece that comes in and out of unison in these gorgeous, flickering ways about light and darkness.

But also, I mean, I’m a big fan of earlier music too, and certainly the more time I've spent with works, the more I love them. I got to sing the Bach B minor Mass on a tour over the summer, so I have a deep affinity for that because I've spent so much time with it, and of course, done it with friends, which always makes it better. I mean, there's so much cool new music being written. One of the composers I'm looking at right now is Sharon Nova. She's kind of in that crossover between pop singer-songwriter things and pretty avant-garde classical composition. She has a piece called Carols After a Plague that was commissioned, I believe, by The Crossing, right after, quote unquote, COVID. That's super cool, and I've been listening to that recently. I'm kind of looking into the score for that.

Andy: Alright! Well, that just about wraps our interview with Professor Winchell. Thank you so much for being on the show and be sure to look around the School of the Arts for her.

MW:  Thank you so much. It's been great to be here!

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Andy: Thank you for tuning into our initial episode of Meadows on the Mic, and a big thank you to Professor Winchell for coming on the show. We're excited about everything she's bringing to SMU Meadows, and be sure to attend the choir concert happening on October 1 at 7:30 p.m. in Caruth Auditorium. Stay tuned as we bring you more interviews in the weeks and months to come. This podcast is brought to you by the SMU Meadows Marketing Department and is available on all major podcast platforms. For questions and comments, email us at and follow us on social media at SMU Meadows on all major channels.