Lucinda Thayer
Professor & Director, Choral Activities
Department of Music
Office: NFAC 315
Office Phone: (715) 346-2808
Fax: (715) 346-3163
E-mail: lthayer@uwsp.edu
Lucinda J. Thayer is currently Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. In the fall of 2000 she was named Music Director of the Wausau Lyric Choir. This adult community choir is dedicated to excellence in the performance of sacred choral literature. In June, 2001 the WLC traveled to Italy to give concerts in Rome and at the International Choral Festival in Genoa. The choir was chosen to perform for the 2004 North Central ACDA convention in Sioux Falls, SD. The group made concert tours to England and Wales in July, 2004. France in June, 2009 and Canada in June, 2014. She retired as conductor of that choir in June, 2015.
Thayer came to Wisconsin from Massachusetts, where she was Director of Choral Music at Smith College. Prior to teaching at Smith, she conducted and taught at Mary Baldwin College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Central Florida. She served as conductor of the Springfield (MA) Symphony Chorus from 1989 until 1996 and has the distinction of being the first woman ever to hold that position in the seventy-one years' history of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra. In the fall of 1994, she served as Visiting Conductor of the New Haven (CT) Chorale and she was guest conductor of the Back Bay Chorale in Boston, MA in the fall of 1995.
Ms. Thayer's most recent guest conducting included concerts with the Central Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra in December, 2001. Her choirs from Smith College presented concert tours in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Italy and Austria. She has directed choruses for the former Florida Symphony Orchestra and the Orlando Opera Company. She has served as guest conductor of the Springfield Symphony and she conducted both the orchestra and chorus twice during the 1994-95 season.
A native of Massachusetts, she completed her undergraduate degree in voice and piano at the University of Massachusetts and did her graduate work at Indiana University School of Music. She has studied with the late Julius Herford and Margaret Hillis, conductor emeritus of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chorus. She received scholarships to continue her studies at the Aspen Music Festival with John Nelson, Helmuth Rilling and others. In 1994, she was selected to study Mendelssohn's Elijah with the late Robert Shaw, conductor emeritus of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
Prof. Thayer is a member of the Music Educators National Conference, Wisconsin Music Educators Association, American Choral Directors Association, and the International Federation for Choral Music. She completed eight years on the board of the Wisconsin Choral Directors Association, having served as a district representative, President-Elect, President, and Past President. She holds membership in honorary societies, including Pi Kappa Lambda and Phi Eta Sigma, and is an honorary member of Sigma Alpha Iota.
In the spring of 2000, Prof. Thayer was nominated by the UWSP Student Government Association for an Excellence in Teaching award. She remains active as a guest conductor and adjudicator. She served as a member of an international panel of judges for an international choral competition in Verona, Italy in the spring of 2006, and 2008-2010, and 2013. In the spring of 2007 and 2012, she served as the leader for UWSP's Semester Abroad. In January, 2015 she was awarded the Morris D. Hayes Lifetime Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Choral Directors Association for outstanding contribution to choral music in Wisconsin.