Two Vanderbilt Blair School of Music faculty members have been promoted to associate professor with tenure effective the fall 2008 semester.

The faculty members are David Childs, associate professor of choral studies, and Michael Slayton, associate professor of music theory.

Childs is the director of the Vanderbilt Symphonic Choir, the Blair Chamber Choir and the musical director for the Blair Lyric Theater. He is also music director for the Vanderbilt Opera Theater program and has conducted performances of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. Childs has served as clinician and adjudicator in the United States on numerous occasions, working at the grade school, college, and community levels. He has conducted All-State and honor choirs in Tennessee, Virginia, Louisiana, Oregon, Alabama, and Florida. His compositions frequently appear at state festivals and workshops, and at ACDA state, regional, and national conventions. 

In addition to conducting and teaching, Childs has more than 30 choral works in print with Santa Barbara Music Publishers, Alliance Music and Colla Voce. Childs was recently invited to be a guest conductor with Manhattan Concert Productions, New York.

Slayton chairs the composition/theory department at Blair. His music is regularly programmed in the U.S. and abroad, most recently in the Conservatoire royale de Bruxelles, Belgium; Chemnitz and Weimar, Germany; the Operafestival Kristiansund in Kristiansund, Norway; the Festival Internacional de Piano in Aviero, Portugal; the Festival International Albert Roussel in Marquette-lez-Lille, France; and the Nashville Ballet’s Emergence Project.

He has won several awards for his teaching and writing, including the Louisa Stude Sarofim Prize for Composition and the TMTA Composer of the Year Award in 2001. 

Slayton’s current projects include the Sonate Droyssig, a solo work for pianist Ulrich Urban, professor of piano at the Hochschule fur Musik, ‘Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’ in Leipzig, Germany, and an upcoming book about composer Elizabeth Austin. 

Contact: Missy Pankake, 615-322-NEWS
missy.pankake@vanderbilt.edu