School of Music alumna Cindy Beitmen (MM, Vocal Performance), a significant and much-beloved figure in the Bay Area early music community, died on April 15, 2024 of metastatic colon cancer.
Beitmen earned a Master of Music in Vocal Performance at the University of Washington in the early 1990s, performing and studying under the tutelage of Margriet Tindemans, singing with Margriet’s Collegium and the Medieval Women’s Choir. While in Seattle, she also performed as soloist with the Seattle Chamber Singers, Broadway Symphony, Vancouver Early Music Festival, and the Early Music Society of the Islands in Victoria, B.C. as well as with UW Opera, performing the role of Katisha in UW’s production of The Mikado in the late 1980s.
Performance opportunities later led her to New York City, where she sang with Pomerium, the Virgin Consort, Symphony for the United Nations, Ensemble Fortuna based in Boston, and the British ensemble Circa 1500. As a member of the New York Ensemble for Early Music, she toured throughout the United States in the medieval liturgical drama Herod and the Innocents and performed the Resurrection Play of Tours at the New York Cloisters.
Cindy later moved to Arizona to teach voice and vocal diction at Northern Arizona University. Flagstaff became a base for back-road trips all over the Colorado Plateau and is where Cindy met her spouse Kate Sibley in 1996, leading to other adventures, including many years of work at the Telluride Film Festival, where Kate served as the dean of education programs. The couple later relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Cindy built her career one small job at a time, until she was shuttling among four separate jobs beginning in 2012 when she was hired as artistic director of the Contra Costa Chorale.
In 2017, when Cindy was diagnosed with colorectal cancer, she took a semester off from the Chorale but also retired as the founder and director of the Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble (WAVE) and choral director/early music instructor at Mills College. She kept her position as music director at St. Albert Priory in Oakland until the pandemic brought that job to a halt. In all of these positions, Cindy was admired and beloved for her adherence to the highest musical standards and for her humor.
Coming out of the pandemic, Cindy immediately focused her professional attention on rebuilding the Contra Costa Chorale, re-energizing the group and gradually building it into a cohesive, tight-knit, beautifully balanced singing ensemble. The 80-member Chorale celebrated her life and legacy in concerts in May 2024 that featured the premiere of Joan Szymko's “Seed,” a work earlier commissioned by the Chorale to celebrate Cindy’s tenure with the group.