Music Director
Susan Swaney, Music Director
Music Director Susan Swaney brings a wealth of varied experience to the UU Church of Bloomington, having performed everything from viol consorts to opera premieres to jazz backup. Swaney has been music director of the UU Church since 1992, during which time the choir has grown to over 50 members and commissioned or premiered many new choral pieces.
Swaney is also Artistic Director of the chamber choir Voces Novae, which presents thematic multi-dimensional programs and whose two-CD book Meditations on Life~Death was distributed to over 3000 hospices across the U.S. She is former director of the Indiana University Children's Choir program, where she oversaw five choirs and directed the Chamber Choir (whose performance on Paul Hillier's Carols of the Old and New World, Vol. II was called "amazing and diction-perfect" by a USA Today reviewer). She was also music director of the Indiana University Theater production of Pirates of Penzance and currently teaches in the IU School of Music Department of Choral Conducting.
Currently writing her dissertation for a doctorate in Choral Conducting at Indiana University, Swaney holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Music History and Violin from the University of Michigan and a Master of Music degree in Voice Performance from Indiana University, where she sang lead soprano roles in John Adams' Nixon in China, Bernstein's Candide, Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles, Stravinsky's Les Noces, and Fiddler on the Roof (with Giorgio Tozzi as Tevye). She has also been soprano soloist in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 with orchestras in Indiana; premiered the operas Easter Eve by Constance Cooper at Princeton University and Fire in My Bones by Deborah Phelps in Indianapolis and Nashville, TN, and the oratorio Dreams within a Dream by Cary Boyce with the Bloomington Chamber Singers. As a member of the Aguava New Music Ensemble, she has performed at the Tempus Fugit Festival in Tel Aviv, the Microtonal Music Festival in New York City, Festival Cervantino in Mexico, and at the Library of Congress.
