Steven M. Demorest

Steven M. Demorest conducts the University of Washington Men’s Glee Club and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in choral music methods, research methods, psychology of music, music and language, and the cognitive neuroscience of music. He is professor of Music Education and was a Donald E. Petersen endowed fellow from 2003-2006. In 2007 he received the Weston H. Noble award for outstanding contributions to choral music from Luther College, his alma mater.

Dr. Demorest’s research interests include the cross-cultural musical understanding, music cognition, sight-singing pedagogy, and the application of neuroimaging techniques to music research. Demorest’s recent publications include articles on enculturation effects in music cognition, sight-singing instruction, children’s preferences for world music, pitch-matching, and neuroimaging studies of cross-cultural musical understanding.

He is the author of Building Choral Excellence: Teaching Sight-singing in the Choral Rehearsal, published by Oxford University Press, and the editor of a series of lectures by Weston Noble, Creating the Special World, published by GIA.

His scholarly work has been published in Music Perception, NeuroImage, Journal of Research in Music Education, Music Educators Journal, Council for Research in Music Education Bulletin, Psychomusicology, and the International Journal of Research on Choral Singing. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Research in Music Education, the Music Educators Journal, Musicae Scientiae, Empirical Musicology Review, and the International Journal of Research on Choral Singing.

A nationally known clinician, Demorest has lectured at the American Choral Directors Association National Conference, The Music Educators National Conference and at many state and regional ACDA and MENC conferences. He served for seven years as the music director for the Northwest Chamber Chorus, a select 45-voice mixed ensemble. In addition to a busy concert schedule, they produced four compact discs: Credo, Wassail!, Coronation Anthems, and Songs of the Americas.

Demorest holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.M. in Choral Conducting from Westminster Choir College, and a B.A. in music from Luther College.

r1008