Choral Invitational

Dr. Tom FitzStephens

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Dr. Thomas FitzStephens holds a Bachelor of Choral Music Education from The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, a Master of Music in Conducting from Michigan State University’s College of Music, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Music Teaching and Learning from Georgia State University. He studied conducting with Dr. Jerry Blackstone, Dr. Sandra Snow, Dr. Jonathan Reed, and Dr. David Rayl, and voice with George Irving Shirley and Molly Fillmore.

Dr. FitzStephens currently serves as Assistant Professor, Director of Choral Activities and Music Education, at Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia. He also serves as Music Director of Harmonia Atlanta, and as Choir Director at Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, Georgia. Prior to CSU, Dr. FitzStephens served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Oglethorpe University and taught middle and high school music for seventeen years. For a decade he served as Vocal Music Director at the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program at Berry College, working with Georgia’s most gifted high school students. He also worked for five years with professional singers at Capitol City Opera of Atlanta, leading and performing in the Madrigal Singers, a Renaissance-themed vocal ensemble.

Dr. FitzStephens’s writing is published in Visions of Research in Music Education, Teaching Music magazine, and his dissertation, Why do Adults Sing? The Impact of the High School Experience, is available in ScholarWorks. He has presented at state and international music education conventions.

 

Dr. Kurt-Alexander Zeller

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Kurt-Alexander Zellerbegan performing in opera, musical theatre, and oratorio in his native Pacific Northwest at age eight. Since then, he has performed throughout the United States, Spain, and Austria, and has appeared on German television, winning acclaim for his memorable characterizations as a singing actor. Among his favorite roles are Don Anchise il Podestà in La finta giardiniera and Monostatos in The Magic Flute by Mozart, Eumete in Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Filippo in Haydn’s L’infedeltà delusa, The Minstrel in Once Upon a Mattress, Tschang-Ling in the American premiere of Alexander Zemlinsky’s opera Der Kreidekreis in Cincinnati, and many roles in the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, Johann Strauss, and Franz Lehár. His other performance activities have included a tour of Austria in a revue of the music of Kurt Weill, performing weekly “operatic soap operas” on the streets of Portland, Oregon, under a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and two seasons in the company of the Tony® Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Dr. Zeller is in demand as an oratorio soloist and recitalist and has appeared as a concert soloist for the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, New Trinity Baroque, the Terra Nova Consort, the Portland and Salem (OR) Chamber Orchestras, the Southern Crescent Symphony, and many other symphonies and concert series.

He also has served as stage director of Rogue Opera’s productions of La Cenerentola, The Barber of Seville, and Don Pasquale and recently staged a program of sacred opera scenes for the Sacred in Opera Initiative of the National Opera Association at its 2013 national conference in Portland, Oregon. His 2009 staging of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde at Clayton State University, in partnership with schools in the Clayton County Public Schools, was profiled by Opera America’s Education Talk as an example of excellence in opera education and community outreach. He has previously directed Cosi fan tuttè and The Elixir of Love for Peach State Opera.

Dr. Zeller is Director of Opera and Vocal Studies and Coordinator of the Division of Music at Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia, and is active throughout the country as a vocal adjudicator and clinician. Dr. Zeller trained at the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. His graduate studies were at the College-Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati, where he was awarded the MM in Voice Performance and a DMA in Voice Performance with cognate studies in Opera Directing and Musicology.

Dr. Francisca Maxwell

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Soprano Francisca Maxwell studied at the Royal Conservatorium in Brussels, department of the Erasmus Homeschool, where she obtained a Bachelor’s and a Master’s Degree in Vocal Arts and a certificate in Vocal Pedagogy. In 1997, she was granted a Fulbright Scholarship and continued her education at the University of Texas at Austin where she graduated with a DMA in Voice Performance in 2002. A Belgian native, Francisca worked as a free-lance singer in Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany. She was staged in many operas and operettas, with lead roles in L’Incorronazione di Poppea, Dido and Aeneas, Rinaldo, Alcina, Le Nozze di Figaro, Die Fledermaus, Eine Nacht in Venedig and Paganini. She equally portrays herself in oratorio, recitals and chamber music. Francisca immigrated to Atlanta in 2009 and held a position as artist affiliate at Agnes Scott College before joining the faculty at Clayton State University in the fall of 2018.