We are pleased to welcome Dr. Laurie Matheson as our new Director of Music beginning on August 12. A search team composed of choir members, musicians, and Wesley UMC leaders unanimously recommended Dr. Matheson to our personnel committee with great enthusiasm. She will be a wonderful addition to our congregation and our music ministries.
Laurie Matheson is a singer, composer, choral conductor, organist, and director of the University of Illinois Press. From 2000-2019 she served as the organist and adult choir director at First Congregational United Church of Christ, Decatur, IL. In 2013 she founded Prairie Voices, a community choir based in Champaign, IL. She has directed choirs at Millikin University (Decatur), the University of Illinois, and Westtown School (Westtown, PA), where she taught grade 6 through 12 vocal music. She previously directed church choirs in Colorado and New Jersey and served as interim organist at St. Andrews Lutheran Church and Campus Center (ECLA) at the University of Illinois.
A native of Boulder, CO, Matheson holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in choral music from the University of Illinois, a Master of Music in choral conducting from Westminster Choir College, and a Bachelor of Arts with high honors in English Literature from Swarthmore College. She spent several summers singing with the Westminster Choir in residence at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC, and Spoleto, Italy, and she was a choir member for two choral recordings with Joseph Flummerfelt and Westminster Choir. With the Westminster Symphonic Choir she has sung under such conductors as Riccardo Muti, Zubin Mehta, and Hugh Wolff.
An accomplished composer, Matheson has written dozens of anthems for choir as well as secular songs for solo voice. Her compositions have been performed and, in some cases, commissioned by ensembles including Baroque Artists of Champaign, the University of Illinois German Choir, Holy Ghost Catholic Church in Denver, and First Presbyterian Church in Champaign, in addition to First Congregational UCC in Decatur. In 2013 the theatre program at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College in Terre Haute, IN, presented an original musical production of The Tempest, directed by Sharon Ammen, featuring twelve new songs composed by Matheson to Shakespeare’s texts. In 2012 Prairie Voices performed A Book of Songs, four settings of poems by William Butler Yeats, with guest tenor soloist Stephen Cary.
As Director of the University of Illinois Press, Matheson draws on her experience building ensembles in overseeing a staff of 40. The Press publishes some 80 new scholarly books annually as well as more than 40 academic journal titles.
