October 7 Westheimer: Singing as Resistance Laura Clapp and Cathy Roma

Registration is required. Please be sure to register for this event using the OneStop app.

Westheimer Session Description:
This session asks community members to gather together to learn about how music inspires connection, community, and courage in the face of social and political challenges. Both Clapp and Roma will share their experiences of establishing and conducting choirs inside prisons. They will ask participants to join together singing as they reflect upon prison and immigration detention and the role of music in creating awareness, hope, and solidarity among all people. 

Workshop facilitator/presenter bios:

Laura Clapp is assistant professor of Music and Wilmington College. Laura most recently served as faculty in the college of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan where she also directed the University of Michigan’s prison outreach choir, Out of the Blue. Prior to graduate studies, Laura worked with Voices of Hope, a Minneapolis-based prison choir organization, as a recipient of the Yale Glee Club Service Through Music Fellowship. While in Minnesota, Laura also co-directed StreetSong, a choir for people who have experienced homelessness, and directed the choir at Peace United Methodist Church. Laura has served as a soprano and teaching artist with Border CrosSing and performed as a violinist in a string quartet at U-M. During her time as an undergraduate student at Yale, Laura served as a student conductor of the Yale Glee Club and a researcher for the New Muses Project, contributing to their database of women and BIPOC composers.

Catherine Roma has created numerous vibrant choral communities that reach across barriers of race, religion, class, sexual orientation and age. Her beliefs in feminism, social justice, and Quaker models of leadership fundamentally shape her approach to musical activism. She holds a doctorate in choral conducting from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music and was founder and longtime director of MUSE Cincinnati Women’s Choir and the Martin Luther King Coalition Chorale in Cincinnati. In 2012, Roma created the World House Choir in Yellow Springs, the name taken from a reflection by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in which he likens the modern world to a house that we must live in together. She currently serves as the Choir's director where she continues her social justice work.

In 1990 Roma became an educator in the prisons through the Wilmington College Prison Education Program and established the UMOJA Men's chorus at Warren Correctional Institution in Ohio; she has continued her commitment to conducting choirs in prisons to this day. For the past three years Roma founded and conducts NIA Men’s Chorus at Chillicothe Correctional and is dedicated to working with justice-impaired individuals. 

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