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| David Findley |
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My musical life began with four-year professional singing stint as a boy chorister at the Washington Cathedral, singing
good to great music written to be performed by trained singers my age, usually with professional adult singers. This
wonderful experience was made more so by the fact that some of the music we boys loved was new music, mostly by
Richard Wayne Dirksen, our Junior Choir director. My grandmother, a former small college voice and piano teacher,
had brought me to audition at the Cathedral. When she died, we moved to Ohio and my systematic musical training
ended, apart from a year and a half of violin lessons that started my junior year at the University of Cincinnati. This
violin study was inspired by my dating the violinist who later became my wife, Mary Findley.
I have learned a lot about music from Mary and her professional colleagues. But I have only just now found time to
take regular voice lessons, at the start of my semi-retirement, when I am working two days a week--instead of five and
more as a mathematician/statistician. I worked first in academia for thirteen years and then at the U.S. Census Bureau
for twenty-nine. Returning to singing and lessons, for the last five years, I have had 2-3 voice lessons a year from
superb teachers (including Chris Dudley's mother Nancy Long) at the week-long annual Chorworks workshops run by
Philip Cave in Alexandria and at the 2007 Musica Ficta workshop in Rimini led by Peter Philips. (What a pity that
occasional inspired guidance doesn’t have the same effect as regular lessons and practice.) My regular singing is now
with the Cathedral Voices, starting from its founding three years ago as the first amateur choir in the Washington
Cathedral's history. I have learned a lot, also about how much more I need to learn as a singer, from its exceptional
directors, especially Mike McCarthy. Before the Voices, I sang for eighteen years with Patrick Jacobson’s Capella
Antiqua of Washington. This is an early music group specializing in chant and polyphony that provides historical
liturgies and music for services at Catholic and Episcopal churches in the Washington area.
good to great music written to be performed by trained singers my age, usually with professional adult singers. This
wonderful experience was made more so by the fact that some of the music we boys loved was new music, mostly by
Richard Wayne Dirksen, our Junior Choir director. My grandmother, a former small college voice and piano teacher,
had brought me to audition at the Cathedral. When she died, we moved to Ohio and my systematic musical training
ended, apart from a year and a half of violin lessons that started my junior year at the University of Cincinnati. This
violin study was inspired by my dating the violinist who later became my wife, Mary Findley.
I have learned a lot about music from Mary and her professional colleagues. But I have only just now found time to
take regular voice lessons, at the start of my semi-retirement, when I am working two days a week--instead of five and
more as a mathematician/statistician. I worked first in academia for thirteen years and then at the U.S. Census Bureau
for twenty-nine. Returning to singing and lessons, for the last five years, I have had 2-3 voice lessons a year from
superb teachers (including Chris Dudley's mother Nancy Long) at the week-long annual Chorworks workshops run by
Philip Cave in Alexandria and at the 2007 Musica Ficta workshop in Rimini led by Peter Philips. (What a pity that
occasional inspired guidance doesn’t have the same effect as regular lessons and practice.) My regular singing is now
with the Cathedral Voices, starting from its founding three years ago as the first amateur choir in the Washington
Cathedral's history. I have learned a lot, also about how much more I need to learn as a singer, from its exceptional
directors, especially Mike McCarthy. Before the Voices, I sang for eighteen years with Patrick Jacobson’s Capella
Antiqua of Washington. This is an early music group specializing in chant and polyphony that provides historical
liturgies and music for services at Catholic and Episcopal churches in the Washington area.
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