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Since the fall of 2015, Dr. Brent Rogers has served as Assistant Professor of Music
and Director of Choral Activities at Dickinson State University, where he conducts
the DSU Chorale, DSU Chamber Singers, and Dickinson Choral Union. Under his direction,
the DSU choirs have been consistently praised for their performances, and continue
to draw larger and larger audiences, including a full house for their 2015 holiday
concert at Assumption Abbey in Richardton. Recently, Dr. Rogers and the DSU choirs
were honored by a personal invitation to perform Mozart’s Requiem as part of a festival
choir at New York’s famed Carnegie Hall in March of 2017.
As a graduate student at the University of Arizona, Dr. Rogers was awarded a prestigious
graduate assistantship to serve as conductor of the UA Collegium Musicum, the University’s
primary early music ensemble. His performances with the Collegium showcased a wide
variety of well-known and lesser-known repertoire from the Renaissance and Baroque
periods, and often included choral-orchestral works. Prior to coming to UA, Dr. Rogers
served as Professor of Music at Arizona Western College in Yuma, Arizona, where he
conducted the AWC Chamber Singers and Yuma Chorale. Under his direction, the Chamber
Singers gave their premiere performance at the Northern Arizona University Jazz/Madrigal
Festival, where they were praised by their adjudicator as being among the finest ensembles
at the Festival.
Dr. Rogers’ first two years of college were spent pursuing a degree in piano performance,
after which he changed his major to choral music education, and transferred to Brigham
Young University, where he sang for five years with the internationally-acclaimed
BYU Singers. For three of those years he served as their assistant conductor while
pursuing a master’s degree in choral conducting. During his time in grad school at
BYU and UA, Dr. Rogers had the unique opportunity to participate in choral music making
at a very high level in an unusually broad range of repertoire, from intimate and
unaccompanied to large-scale symphonic, and from the Renaissance up through the present
day. He has consistently been asked to serve as a soloist in the choral ensembles
in which he sings, and has also sung professionally with the Tucson Chamber Artists
and Brevitas. As a solo singer, Dr. Rogers performs regularly in recital and concert,
including a performance as the baritone soloist in the 2016 production of Handel’s
Messiah in Bismarck. He also appears regularly as a collaborative pianist with singers
and instrumentalists.
In addition to his activities as a conductor and singer, Dr. Rogers teaches courses
in Aural Skills, Vocal Methods, Lyric Diction, Conducting, Music History, and Music
Education. He has a particular passion for diction, and enjoys helping students to
understand the nuances of foreign language pronunciation. His research interests include
choral music in the Medieval period, and the nineteenth-century French Requiem tradition.
His article on Camille Saint-Saëns’s Requiem will appear in the May 2018 issue of
the Choral Journal.
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