Dr. Hilary Apfelstadt
Hilary Apfelstadt is Director of Choral Activities and Professor of Conducting at the University of Toronto where she was named the inaugural Faculty Teaching Excellence Award winner in 2013. She holds the Elmer Iseler Chair in Conducting. She is also artistic director of the Exultate Chamber Singers, a semi-professional ensemble in Toronto. Raised in Nova Scotia, she earned degrees from the University of Toronto, the University of Illinois, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Formerly Director of Choral Activities and Associate Director of the School of Music at the Ohio State University (1993 – 2010), she has conducted choirs at divisional and national conferences of the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA), and conducted the U of T MacMillan Singers at Podium 2012, the national conference of the Association of Canadian Choral Communities (ACCC). She has led choral festivals in Europe, and at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York. In 2009, she conducted the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in a live broadcast of “Music and the Spoken Word.” She has directed all-state choruses in more than 30 states and led the 2011 Ontario Youth Choir. She conducted the 2014 National Youth Choir of Canada in an all-Canadian program in a tour of the Maritime provinces culminating with a performance at Podium in Halifax, N.S. For several years, Dr. Apfelstadt was a member of the Robert Shaw Festival Singers and recorded two Grammy award-winning CDs with them in France.
She is a prolific writer, having published several chapters in books (Wisdom, Wit and Will, Women Choral Conductors on their Art, GIA 2009; Conducting Women’s Choirs: Strategies for Success, GIA 2012), and more than eighty articles in a variety of professional journals. She serves on the Editorial Board for the ACDA Choral Journal, and is choral column editor for the Canadian Music Educator.
