Matthew Blegen

Matthew used to make his liv­ing singing the praises of oth­ers: first as an ad cre­ative on Madi­son Avenue, and later as a pub­lic rela­tions and mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive on the West Coast. Today, Matthew is in the sec­ond year of work on his Doc­tor of Musi­cal Arts in choral con­duct­ing, hav­ing com­pleted his Mas­ter of Music in Vocal Per­for­mance at the UW in 2006 study­ing with tenor Vin­son Cole. Cur­rently he is the founder and artis­tic direc­tor of Red Thread Chorale Arts, a south sound non-profit that sup­ports sev­eral choral ensem­bles, includ­ing the Olympia Gay Men’s Choir which Matthew founded and con­ducts. He is also the founder of the Anna’s Bay Cen­ter for Music where he served as Artis­tic Direc­tor for eight years and led the Anna’s Bay Chorale in per­for­mances both locally and nation­ally. As a soloist he has been heard most recently with the Bre­mer­ton and Olympia Sym­phony Orches­tras, and in 2012 Matthew was awarded Mason County Cham­ber of Commerce’s 2012 “Cit­i­zen of the Year Award” for his work enrich­ing children’s musi­cal oppor­tu­ni­ties in severely under­served rural areas. At the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton he serves as Assis­tant Con­duc­tor of the Uni­ver­sity Chorale, and his dis­ser­ta­tion research focuses on the power of choral singing to build com­mu­nity edu­ca­tion­ally, eco­nom­i­cally and civically.