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 Mary
Sherman Lycan, the founding conductor
of Women's Voices Chorus, has spent the last ten years as a researcher,
publisher, performer, conductor and advocate of classical choral
music for women's voices.
Born in Connecticut
in 1947, she began piano lessons at age 7, and learned sight-singing
in the Glastonbury public schools. At age 11, she joined the St.
Cecilia Girls' Choir at St. James's Church, New London, and the
choir at the then all-girls' Williams School. She graduated
from Brown University with an A.B in music, and studied musicology
at the University of Chicago. She has studied choral conducting
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Daniel
Huff and Susan Klebanow. She
has played the organ and sung in choirs from Columbus, Ohio to
Sydney, Australia, including one term as a chorister at St. Paul's
Anglican Cathedral, Wellington, New Zealand. She has also been
organist
and choir director at various Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and Episcopal
churches in the Triangle area of North Carolina.
In the autumn
of 1991, while living temporarily in Palo Alto, California, Mary
joined the Peninsula Women's
Chorus, directed by the late Patricia Hennings. After a twenty-seven
year hiatus from women's choirs, the beauty and power of 60 adult
women singing together were a revelation to her, and she determined
to start a women's chorus when she returned to Chapel Hill.
In 1993 Women's
Voices Chorus was born. Looking for lost historic repertoire
by women composers for the chorus to sing, she has amassed a database
of a thousand pieces by women, for women, through research at
the Library of Congress. At choral conductors' conventions, she
heard fellow conductors of women's choirs begging a panel of publishers
for more good repertoire for women's chorus so she started a desktop
publishing venture. In 1995 Treble
Clef Music Press was born. Wishing more community-based
women's choirs could enjoy the musical growth and pure fun of
a festival, she also started the North Carolina Women's Choral
Festival in 2002.
Mary is an
active member of the American Choral
Directors Association. She was recently named the North Carolina
state chair for women's chorus repertoire and standards. She has
presented workshops on women's choral history and repertoire at
regional and national conventions of the ACDA.
Mary and
her husband, William G. Lycan, have one daughter, Jane. Mary is
an avid knitter, and can sometimes be found rowing a boat on University
Lake in Chapel Hill.
Photo
by Bill Wilcox
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