St Vladimir's Seminary is pleased to announce two new appointments in the field of Liturgical Music.  Alla Generalow has been appointed to the position of Director of Liturgical Music at St Vladimir's Seminary. This is a full-time faculty position responsible for the music instruction of our M.Div. and M.A. students and for the supervision and direction of the Chapel choirs, which she will assume in Fall 2008. Alla comes to us with a Master of Music degree in Conducting from Michigan State University, and is due to complete her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Choral Conducting at the University of Arizona this summer. Her dissertation is a focused study on the liturgical and non-liturgical choral performance history of Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil, Op. 37, which she will conduct a performance of this April. Alla began singing in church at the age of seven with the mixed choir of the Novo-Diveevo women's monastery in Spring Valley, New York and has been the conductor at various churches in New York, Ohio, and Michigan since the age of sixteen. She has taught voice, choral music, and conducting, with enthusiastic reviews from her students and professors. As an active, professional, chamber vocalist, she has most recently given concerts and adjudicated throughout Arizona while working on her doctorate. Her primary specialization and research interests are Russian and Serbian Orthodox sacred music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Mark Bailey has been appointed to the position of Director of the Peter Prokofieff Advanced Certificate in Liturgical Music, a new program for the training of choir directors, which will be launched in Fall 2009. (More information about this program to follow.) Mark has taught as an adjunct in Liturgical Music at St Vladimir's since 1992. He is currently a Research Associate and Fellow at Yale University, the Artistic Director of the renowned Yale Russian Chorus, music director of the New Haven Oratorio Choir, and a Vice-President of the Pan-Orthodox Society for the Advancement of Liturgical Music (PSALM), positions that he will continue to hold, as well as having held many other distinguished positions in the past. Through his tireless activity and numerous compositions, Mark is one of the most prominent people working in the field of Liturgical Music in the US.

We are tremendously excited about these developments. St Vladimir's Seminary has had a long and distinguished tradition of Liturgical Music, for many years under the care of Professor David Drillock, and more recently under that of Deacon Kevin Smith. With these two new appointments, St Vladimir's Seminary is set to become the preeminent institution for Orthodox Liturgical Music in the Western world. We are sure that their collaboration and the inauguration of the Advanced Certificate program will bear much fruit for the benefit of the Church.