Deirdre Kellerman: Baton in one hand, 6 choirs in the other.

When speaking to Deirdre Kellerman this past November over Zoom, her dedication and strength stood out to me the most—that and her good sense of humour when speaking about her enormous workload. Unlike the majority of choir conductors and church music directors, Deirdre specializes in uncommon choir dynamics. She is the Director of Music at First Unitarian Congregation of Ottawa, a denomination that focuses on community, love, and nature over any deity. First Unitarian has three still active choral ensembles: Chalice Choir, Fusion Chamber Choir, and Three Rivers Singers. Chalice Choir consists of 40-60 members that sing during church service, while Fusion is a 20 voice choir that focuses on contemporary music. Three Rivers Singers is an upper-voice ensemble of 16 voices.

She recently became the Virtual Artistic Director of Tone Cluster—quite a queer choir, and is also the Artistic Director of Hypatia’s Voice, an auditioned upper-voice choral ensemble. Additionally, she is the Assistant Director of the Ottawa Choral Society.

Deirdre is initially from Nova Scotia, where she received her Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance. She then attended the New England Conservatory for her Master’s in Music in Choral Conducting. Of her many accomplishments in the choral world, Deirdre was nominated for the Leslie Bell Prize in Choral Conducting in 2018 and been awarded a residency at the Banff Centre Choral Art program. Deirdre has sung in the Xara Choral Theatre, the Nova Scotia Youth Choir, the National Youth Choir of Canada, and Aella—Ottawa’s unconnected advanced treble ensemble.

Unfortunately, due to COVID, Deirdre’s private lessons are mostly canceled as she has taken on new responsibilities in her choral career. Before the pandemic, Deirdre had a fully-booked studio where she taught students of all ages in piano, voice, and music theory.

Every last choir Deirdre directs is online. Meaning that Deirdre is conducting over zoom almost every day! Although Deirdre spoke briefly about the stress brought on by online choir and that her work sometimes feels like an ongoing daily struggle. Tending to six separate choirs takes an incredible amount of time. Deirdre stated that it takes double the time to work with a virtual choir as opposed to an in-person choir. Preparation, planning, responding to emails that would generally be quick questions after choir and learning all the new tech add time to the task of conducting choir. Not to mention teaching the technology to seniors, making difficult decisions when it comes to in-person ensembles, and acting as infectious disease specialist and therapist for hundreds of people. Deirdre has chosen a difficult path during a global pandemic, a feat that sometimes feels insurmountable. Like many of us, Deirdre feels like she is just hanging on and learning to roll with the punches of this new virtual aspect of her career. However, her dedication to her choirs and their communities was apparent during our conversation. For being on the younger end of the spectrum when it comes to Ottowan choir leaders, Deirdre has hoisted a huge responsibility, and her efforts are not to be overlooked.

In the following post, I will be discussing her choirs and their community more in-depth.