Alumni inducted into the Westminster Choir College Music Education Hall of Fame

Patrick Freer and Erica Washburn were inducted into Westminster’s Music Education Hall of Fame this spring. The award was established by the Westminster Choir College Music Education Department to honor alumni who have made a substantial contribution to the field of music education and who have shown strong support for Westminster’s students and Music Education program.

Freer ’88, MM’93 is Professor of Music at Georgia State University. He is a former Interim Director of the School of Music. He also holds affiliate faculty status with the Institute of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State. He is past chair of the National Association for Music Education (NAfME ) Gender & Sexuality Special Research Interest Group. In addition to his degrees from Westminster Choir College, he earned a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University. 

He has guest conducted or presented in 36 states and 16 countries and has presented at six national conventions of the American Choral Directors Association and seven national conferences of the National Association for Music Education. He was keynote speaker and guest conductor for the 2015 International Symposium of Singing and Song. Earlier this year he served as a visiting professor at seven universities in Spain, and he presented research at the NIME5: Narrative Inquiry in Music Education, the LGBTQ Studies in Music Education, and the Gender, Bodies & Technology conferences. He is also academic editor and chair of the Editorial Committees for Music Educators Journal, and he has written multiple book chapters and over 120 articles in most of the field's leading national and international journals. His research focus is on the sociological and pedagogical factors impacting the singing of boys during and beyond the adolescent voice change.

Conductor and mezzo-soprano Erica Washburn ’00 has served as Director of Choral Activities at New England Conservatory (NEC) since 2009. At NEC she conducts the 24-to-28-voice auditioned Chamber Singers and oversees the NEC Concert Choir and graduate Choral Conducting degree program. She teaches Basic Choral Conducting, Advanced Choral Conducting, and Sacred and Secular Choral Literature.

As a conductor, Washburn has worked with the East Carolina University Women's Chorale and Eastman Women's Chorus, she has been a guest conductor for several New York State School Music Association and North Carolina Music Educators Association state festivals, has spent five summers as a conductor and voice faculty member for the New York State Summer School of the Arts School of Choral Studies, and is a sought-after guest clinician.

As a soloist, she has been featured on the Eastman-St. Michaels Recital Series, performed at NEC’s Jordan Hall, given the Boston premieres of two works for mezzo-soprano by the late Richard Toensing with the NEC Symphonic Winds, and performed with the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic, Glens Falls Symphony Orchestra, the Genesee Valley Orchestra and Chorus, and with the Vivificus! Chamber Players.  Her additional orchestral and stage performance credits include Ravel’s Shéhérazade, Madame Lidoine in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, Rebecca Nurse in Robert Ward's The Crucible, Aminta in Mozart's Il re pastore, and Mother/Allison in the premiere of Lee Hoiby’s This is the Rill Speaking.