Main Events

Keynote Speaker Connie McKoy
Keynote: Envisioning What Music Education Can Be
Dr. McKoy will share her vision of how teaching music through a culturally responsive lens can transform music education in a time of critical social change.

Connie McKoy is Marion Stedman Covington Distinguished Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the UNCG School of Music, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate music education courses. She holds a BM in Music Education from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and MM and PhD degrees from UNCG. She has 19 years of public-school teaching experience as a general music teacher, choral director, and band assistant. Her research, which has been presented nationally and internationally, has focused on children’s world music preferences, music teachers’ cross-cultural competence, and culturally responsive pedagogy in music. Her work has been published in numerous music journals, she has served on the editorial review committees of the NAfME publications The Music Educators Journal and Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, and is currently on the editorial review committee for Qualitative Research in Music Education. In 2017 & 2019, she participated in the Yale Symposium on Music in Schools and contributed to the 2017 symposium document, Declaration on Equity in Music for City Students. Dr. McKoy is co-author of Culturally Responsive Teaching in Music Education: From Understanding to Application, published by Routledge. She is an active clinician for state, regional, and national music education organizations, is certified in Level III of Orff Schulwerk pedagogy and has taught recorder for Levels I-III. Connie and her husband Rudy Click live in Kernersville, NC where they enjoy nothing better than spending time with her stepson’s family, which includes 4 grandchildren.

Friday Night with Árpád Tóth
Getting Closer to the “Real” Choir Experience Online
Let’s see together, what kind of possibilities we have to keep our communities singing in quarantine. Tricks, tools, apps, materials and ideas for choral conductors and music teachers.

Dr. Árpád Tóth is a well-known Kodály teacher from the young generation. Tóth has been a lecturer of methodology, solfège, chamber music and choral conducting at the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest since 2012. He is Founding Artistic Director of Csíkszerda, Hungary’s largest community choir, The Barefoot Opera Company, and of the Night of Choirs – Hungary’s largest one-day choral festival. He is an award-winning choral conductor and internationally recognized teacher who has taught for many years in Europe and beyond.