Richard Sparks, Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Conducting & Ensembles, joined the faculty at UNT in 2009 with both a distinguished academic and professional career.
He was a faculty member at Mount Holyoke College and Pacific Lutheran University, where he was Director of Choral Activities from 1983-2001. At PLU, he led the Choir of the West, one of the top undergraduate choirs in the country, on regular tours across the United States, to Japan, China, England, and Scandinavia, and also made eight recordings with that ensemble. Sparks’ D.M.A. is from the University of Cincinnati and his dissertation (Swedish A Cappella Music Since 1945) won the ACDA’s Julius Herford Award in 1997 and later was published as The Swedish Choral Miracle. His new book, The Conductor’s Toolbox: Transforming Yourself as Musician and Conductor, is published by GIA and he’s been invited to do a session at the National ACDA Conference in Kansas City in March 2019.
Sparks has been active in the professional world as well; guest conducting the Anchorage Music Festival (his first year substituting for an ailing Robert Shaw conducting Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem), Portland Symphonic Choir, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Northwest Chamber Orchestra, Exultate Chamber Singers in Toronto, and the Swedish Radio Choir. He first worked with the Swedish Radio Choir in 2002, and again in 2007 and 2008, the first American in more than 35 years to work with that ensemble. With the Radio Choir, among other things, he prepared them for a performance of the Brahms Requiem with Valery Gergiev, which has been released on DVD on the BIS label. He was also the first non-Canadian conductor selected to direct the Canadian National Youth Choir and in 2008 he was Music Director/Conductor for a production of Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo in Edmonton with period instruments. He conducted Allan Bevan’s Nou goth sonne under wode at Carnegie Hall in March 2016 and in the summer of 2016 he guest-conducted the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, one of America’s premier professional choirs. In May 2018 he was guest conductor of the Portland Symphonic Choir.
He founded Seattle Pro Musica and conducted three ensembles with that organization from 1973-80 in over 70 different: conducted the Seattle Symphony Chorale from 1990-94 (preparing the choir for nine recordings on the Delos label); founded and conducted Choral Arts Northwest in Seattle from 1993-2006 (with whom he made three recordings on the Gothic label); and Pro Coro Canada (Edmonton, AB) from 1999 to 2011. A professional chamber choir, Pro Coro toured regularly across Canada and broadcast on CBC Radio.
Since coming to UNT he will have led the Collegium Singers to the Boston Early Music Festival four times (2011, 2013, 2015, and June 2019) and also to the Berkeley Early Music Festival in 2012. The Collegium Singers/Baroque Orchestra performance of Vivaldi's Gloria, led by Sparks, has over 2.1 million hits on YouTube. In 2013, the Collegium Singers performed Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 in a new edition by Hendrik Schulze of our faculty, along with 10 UNT graduate students, published by Bärenreiter. And in 2015, they were selected to sing at the prestigious National Collegiate Choral Organization's conference in Portland, OR.
Visit Richard Spark's website at http://richardsparks1.blogspot.com.