Indiana, PA

The Indiana Encore Chorale recently visited local radio station WDAD, for an on-the-air interview and performance.  Click on the picture below for a photo slide show. Click on the right side of the current picture to advance to the next.

Jane Potter Baumer is excited to bring her twenty years of teaching voice and choral music to the directorship of the new Encore Chorale of Indiana, PA. Jane has a B.A. in Music and International Studies, with a minor in Russian, from Emory University, and an M.S. in Music Education from the University of Illinois.

Jane started her career teaching K-8 general and choral music at the Atlanta International School. While in Atlanta, she sang with the late Robert Shaw’s symphonic and chamber choirs in Atlanta, France, and Carnegie Hall. Shaw’s choirs made over a dozen recordings for the Telarc label during those years, and Jane was the Russian diction coach for his Grammy-winning recording of Rachmaninoff’s Vespers.

Next, Jane taught voice, sight-singing, and music history at Mars Hill College, in Western NC. While is North Carolina, she studied voice with the late William McIver at UNC-Greensboro, and completed graduate coursework in musicology at UNC- Chapel Hill. Life took a turn here, however: Jane’s musicology coursework co-mingled with romance! So after marrying Matt, a fellow graduate student, Jane decided a family with two musicologists in it was a recipe for disaster, and abandoned musicology. She turned instead to her music education roots, and finished her teacher certification for public school music.

Jane then became Chair of Fine Arts and Director of Choral Music at the new Northside College Preparatory High School in Chicago. While there, she grew her choral program from 45 students to 225, in three years. She also oversaw a budget for six teachers, participated in the school’s leadership team, and started a Parent Fine Arts Booster Club that has since raised thousands of dollars for the arts at the school. Northside became, and remains, one of the nation’s top 100 high schools.

When Matt finished his PhD, he accepted a job at Middle Tennessee State University, and he, Jane and their young daughter Haley moved to Murfreesboro, TN. While there, Jane taught freshman music theory at MTSU and general and choral music at a local junior high.

Now, Matt, Jane, Haley and Hannah live in Indiana, PA, where Matt is a tenured assistant professor of music history at IUP, and Jane is in her 5^th year running a home studio for voice and piano. She sings in the 24-voice professional chamber choir, The Pittsburgh Camerata, conducts the choir at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Indiana, and is the musical director for Children’s Footlight Theater at IUP in the summers.

In addition to her work with Robert Shaw’s choirs, Jane has sung with Ohio Light Opera, Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Oregon Bach Festival, and Berkshire Choral Festival (teaching faculty). She has been a mezzo-soprano soloist with the Asheville Symphony and the Pittsburgh Symphony Chamber Orchestra, and has appeared at IUP recently in Weill’s Three Penny Opera, and as The Mother in Menotti’s The Consul.