Since arriving at University of Texas Permian Basin in early September, new Director of Choral Activities Lauren Clark has hit the ground running.
Clark has been at UTPB since Labor Day — her birthday.
“I was interviewed and hired on a Thursday, the Thursday before the semester started. I hopped in my car that Saturday to find an apartment, went back to Kilgore in East Texas and then immediately turned around and came back,” Clark said.
“I was here on Labor Day on my birthday and then the next day as my birthday present, I started with my kids. It was a very fast, but very positive transition,” she said.
Clark was at Kilgore College as interim director of choral and vocal studies before coming to Odessa.
When the pandemic hit, she moved in with her family in West Palm Beach, Fla. She had finished her comprehensive exams for her doctorate at the University of Southern Mississippi in May 2020.
“After that, the world felt like it was falling apart and the best thing for me to do was to be with be with my parents. I’m an only child and it was important to all of us to be together during that time, so I stayed there for two years and I taught music to kids and adults,” Clark said.
“I primarily worked with a community choir system that I grew up in called The Young Singers of the Palm Beaches. I … had my own private voice studio … teaching music theory, sight singing, ear training, voice lessons for those two years before I moved back over to Kilgore,” Clark said.
A native of Seattle, most of her family lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her father got a job building pump stations in the Everglades that pull ammonia out of the water to help revitalize the ecosystem in Florida. What was supposed to be a three-year job turned into 30 years for her parents.
Clark said they just moved back to Seattle over the summer.
She graduated from high school in West Palm Beach. After that she went to Rollins College in Orlando where she earned a bachelor of arts in music with an emphasis in composition and conducting.
Clark earned her master’s in music and choral conducting from the University of South Carolina in Columbia and is all but dissertation in choral conducting and pedagogy from the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.
What appealed to her about the music program at UTPB is that it is an undergraduate only institution.
“Rollins is an undergraduate only institution, but because of that, I was awarded opportunities that I most likely would have missed out on at a larger school with a master’s and/or doctoral program,” Clark said.
“My resume coming out of my undergrad was stacked compared to my friends who had gone to state schools,” she added.
At age 20, Clark did a domestic study in Pennsylvania on Moravian music and got to sing in their festival and be a soloist.
“Looking for a job, finding an undergraduate only institution was important to me. I also have loved being in Texas, so getting to stay in Texas was a total bonus. East Texas and West Texas are obviously incredibly different. I love them both. I’m really thrilled to be out here. I’m enjoying the dry heat. It’s much better than the swampy humidity, plus the heat in Florida. I can do this all day. I grew up in a literal swamp; it’s fine. This is lovely,” Clark said.
There are two choral ensembles at UTPB. The concert choir is made up of everybody who wants to be in a choir.
They audition, but it’s mostly to place them in the right voice part and make sure the group is balanced.
The smaller, auditioned ensemble is the Falconers, which has a higher burden of learning and expectation of difficulty.
Clark said there are 25 to 30 students in the program right now.
Although she’s only been there a short time, she said she’s become attached to her students.
“I care about them so much. There’s really no two ways about it,” Clark said.
She added that the students need to be cared for and loved.
“They deserve it. They work their tails off. They are incredibly diligent. They’re smart as tacks. They’re just such good kids. I really can’t say enough about them. They’re ready to accept any challenge that I draw up at them, like this semester in our auditioned choir, which is called the Falconers … are singing in Estonian and Arabic for (an upcoming) concert. They’re stepping up to the plate and they’re doing a really fabulous job. I’m so proud of them; so, so proud,” Clark said.
Their first performance will be at 7 p.m. Oct. 16 at the Wagner Noël Performing Arts Center. It is free and open to the public.
At one point, Clark thought she would be a dermatologist, but in 11th grade she took AP music theory. While at lunch with her mother one day during Thanksgiving break, she had the epiphany that she was going to be a music major.
She wasn’t a stranger to music having started singing lessons when she was in kindergarten or first grade.
As a youngster, Clark was severely asthmatic, but singing strengthened her lungs.
Clark took a conducting class during her undergraduate years and the professor that is now her mentor, John Sinclair, told her she had a gift for conducting.
Sinclair got her in to conduct the orchestra and choir.
“I basically subbed for him sometimes when he was … out at a conference …,” Clark said.
Now that she’s at UTPB, she has one word for it — grateful.
“I am so grateful to be part of this team. I am so grateful to have such supportive and kind colleagues. They are wonderful to bounce ideas off of. They are all incredibly smart and incredibly forward thinking. I am grateful for the kids. I am grateful for how relatively smooth the transition has been. … I’m just grateful to be in a healthy, happy work environment. This really is a dream come true for me. I know that sounds like super cheesy and cliche, but it is so, so true,” Clark said.
Music Department Chair Dan Keast said Clark was so dynamic in the interview the screen almost “melted away” as she spoke to the committee.
“It was obvious to me how she was committed to student learning and performance. It has also been fabulous to see how quickly she got to work engaging students with active learning. Last week she took her Vocal Pedagogy course to the anatomy lab to dissect a pig and study the larynx, esophagus, and vocal cords,” Keast said.
“In higher education, administrators speak about working across the disciplines, and here Lauren models it within her first month on the job. The students are highly engaged, motivated, and enthusiastic about the new direction for the choral program. We are thrilled to have Lauren on our team and cannot wait for the choir’s first performance later this month,” he added.
