DR. CHRISTIANNE RUSHTON
Mezzo-soprano Christianne Rushton has delighted audiences with her engaging presence and versatility on both the operatic and concert stages. Christianne is a first prize winner of the Canadian National Music Festival, a prize winner at the prestigious Eckhardt-Gramatté Competition, a two-time grant recipient from the Canada Council for the Performing Arts, and a winner of the Canada Council’s Bernard Diamant Prize in Voice. In recital, she debuted at New York’s Alice Tully Hall and was featured on the New York Festival of Songs. She was a guest artist for the Royal Society of Canada, toured with Debut Atlantic, performed at the Indian River Festival, recorded with the Canadian Chamber Choir, has sung with Baltimore Musicales, and performed with Symphony Nova Scotia in Bach’s B Minor Mass, Mozart’s Requiem, and Handel’s Messiah.
Dr. Rushton is Director of the School of Music at Acadia University where she is Professor and head of vocal studies. Christianne is a graduate of the Juilliard Opera Center at The Juilliard School and completed her Doctor of Musical Arts degree from SUNY Stony Brook. She was honored to receive an Emerging Leader Award from the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) for her innovation and success teaching voice. Dr. Rushton is past President of two arts organizations: President of the Canadian Atlantic Provinces Chapter of NATS, and the President of the Nova Scotia Federation of Provincial Music Festivals. Christianne is founder and President of “Discover Your Dynamic Voice”, a program that offers coaching to women and non-binary leaders in order to unlock the power of their own unique voice.
As well as being active as an adjudicator, pedagogue, workshop clinician, and performer across the country, she is a proud mom to two very busy boys, seventeen and fourteen.
DR. KRISSY KEECH
Dr. Krissy Keech is passionate about piano, pedagogy and practicing!
She completed her PhD in Music Education at McGill University, where she focused her doctoral research on elements of piano pedagogy and teacher effectiveness—in particular, applied teachers’ identification and correction of students’ errors. She continues to research teacher effectiveness, effective practice methods, and best practices for error correction.
Dr. Keech has a bachelor’s degree in piano performance from Acadia University, where she studied under Prof. John Hansen, and a master’s in piano performance from McGill University, under Profs. Marina Mdivani and Sara Laimon.
While her university training is in classical music, she has broad experience performing piano music in other styles: jazz, blues, folk, congregational, show tunes, Latin-American, and pop. As an accompanist, Dr. Keech is especially recognized for her rehearsal and performance skills in choral settings. She has worked with the Annapolis Valley Honour Choir, Nova Scotia Youth Choir, Canadian Chamber Choir, and numerous internationally renowned choral conductors (e.g., Elise Bradley, Scott Leithead, Michael Zaugg). She has been on the accompanying staff at Acadia, collaborating with and coaching woodwind students. As a gig musician, she continues a busy schedule of playing and singing at weddings, conferences, church services, restaurants, and other special events.
The guiding principle behind her research and teaching philosophy is the belief in the importance of the well-rounded musician, which includes being able to improvise and compose, in addition to the more traditional skills of learning to read and interpret Western music. Mistakes are also fascinating as they are inevitable and integral to the learning and creative processes. How do teachers, on the one hand, create an atmosphere where mistakes aren’t feared, where errors are embraced as learning opportunities, while on the other hand, maintain high standards of performance?
In addition to teaching full-time at Acadia, Dr. Keech has also been operating a private home piano studio for over 25 years. She adjudicates at music festivals and conducts workshops on topics such as teaching students to improvise, how to practice, and the pedagogy of practice.
PAULA ROCKWELL
Mezzo-soprano, Paula Rockwell, has been steeped in musical projects, performances and music festivals in her home province Nova Scotia, Canada, and the United States. She teaches Applied Voice, Diction for Singers, Scene Studies and History of Musical Theatre at her alma mater, Acadia University, and created productions for Acadia’s School of Music Singing Theatre Production Ensemble. She has been featured on several recordings and co-produced her debut CD entitled Fleeting Melodies, a collection of 20th century art songs and arias.
Paula has taken on several operatic roles since graduating from University of Toronto and has performed with symphony orchestras across the country and the United States. As a community contributor, she has performed for many fundraisers, including Music for Haiti, Women Only at Pier 21 and the annual Opera Nova Scotia’s Opera Valentine. Paula is heard every summer giving masterclasses, vocal warm-up sessions and a recital in Lyman, New Hampshire at The Ogontz Choral Symposium. She adjudicates music festivals on the Provincial and National level and gives clinics/masterclasses on the topic of vocal pedagogy, interpretation, and stage craft. Acadia’s School of Music Lecture & Concert Series premiered Paula’s sabbatical project entitled Letters from Home, based on letters
from her great grandmother to her maternal grandmother (circa 1941-1961) for which she created the script, photo projections and original music. Other projects include a CD of original works entitled Unwrapped…finally surfacing and a music video, I’m on My Way Home, released on Vimeo in November 2020.
She directed a Chamber Music Workshop class of the Canadian/Acadian musical odyssey Pélagie, written by Canadian composer Allen Cole, which was performed at Acadia’s Denton Auditorium. In 2019, she performed the role of Lucy, the Beggar Woman, in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and in 2021 as Signora Nacarelli in Adam Guettel’s Light in the Piazza with the Wolfville Theatre Collective at the Al Whittle Theatre, Wolfville, NS. She made her debut as music director and the role of Yente with Stage Prophets Theatre Company’s production of Fidder on the Roof in May 2019 and relived the role in November 2019 at Halifax’s Spatz Theatre. She was the music director for Stage Prophet’s 20th Anniversary Revue in 2022, Jesus Christ Superstar in 2023, Music Man in 2024 and will be music director and pat of the creative team for Wizard of Oz in 2025. Other performances were with Open Waters Music Festival in Halifax in Sandy Moore’s song cycle Vox Humana poetry by Nova Scotian writer Alex Pierce. She performed her Letters from Home one-woman show for Opera Nova Scotia’s May 2024 production, at The Whittle Theatre in Wolfville, the Yarmouth Historical Society and was invited to perform with the Bridgewater Fire Department Band in an original show entitled Operation Goosepool (WW2 songs & stories.)
JEFF TORBERT
Jeff Torbert is active as a performer, educator, composer, and facilitator of improvisation and creativity.
As a full-time faculty member at Acadia University, Jeff guides music students in advanced musicianship practices, performance, improvisation, and guitar. Jeff works individually with guitar students interested in expanding their creative and performance capacities as well as those pursuing a more specific career such as studio musician, songwriter, educator, or music therapist. Jeff also leads second year music students in a capstone project where they organize and perform a concert fundraiser each spring: this past year (2021) the students raised over $3000 for the Jane Paul Indigenous Women’s Resource Centre in Sydney, Cape Breton.
Performing as an electric and acoustic guitarist and sometimes-pianist-vocalist, Jeff has made music in dozens of genres and contexts, from accompanying opera singers to Tango and Bossa Nova bands, from improvisation collectives to Symphony Nova Scotia, stretching across the fields of pop, folk, rock, and jazz. Jeff has two albums of original music under his name, This Weather Honest (2009), and Urban Poultry & Other Hopes (2011), each earning multiple Music Nova Scotia and East Coast Music Award nominations. The latter album featured Jeff’s frequent collaborator Kenny Talkowski on saxophones and was followed up with a tour of the Netherlands and Belgium in the spring of 2016. They are currently planning another project together scheduled for the fall of 2022. Jeff has also been a frequent collaborator on other artists’ recordings, such as pop musician Rich Aucoin’s Hold and We’re All Dying To Live, jazz vocalist Zoe Leger’s The Girl From Yesterday and folk-crossover musician Anne Janelle’s So Long At The Fair.
Other recent projects include playing guitar in a multi-media project with Canadian soprano Suzie Leblanc with music by composer Jerome Blais entitled mouvance, with 2019 shows in Halifax, Montreal and Joliette, Quebec, with a studio recording scheduled for 2021. Jeff is currently working with US composer Daniel Heidt on a new work written for solo guitar and electronics (2022 tentative) after premiering Heidt’s multi-movement work Dr. Stringlove as part of the 21st Century Guitar Conference in Lisbon, Portugal (March 2021).
REBEKAH MAXNER
Rebekah loves connecting with other musicians young and young at heart as a blogger, clinician and adjudicator. As a blogger, Rebekah covers topics that help piano teachers run professional studios, from business, to parent relations, to engaging students with motivational learning activities.
Rebekah loves traditional rote music and has created YouTube videos that help teach this music. She’s an imaginative composer whose piano music evokes pictures, stories and emotions. Her music is a mixture of styles, blending the influences of Impressionist, jazz, Baroque and popular music, and the folk music of her childhood in Nova Scotia. Her piano solos are listed and published in the UK by the Associated Board of Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) and London College of Music Examinations (LCM), in the USA by the National Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC), and in Canada by the Canadian National Conservatory of Music (CNCM) and The Royal Conservatory (RCM). Rebekah has been featured in Tim Topham’s TopMusicSheets in Australia and Nicola Cantan’s Concept series in Ireland.
Website: Rebecca Maxner
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