Andrew Crow
Associate Professor of Music Performance
Director of Choral Activities
Andrew Crow joined the Ball State University faculty in 2009. As Director of Choral Activities, he leads the Ball State Chamber Choir and Cardinal Chorus. Crow also teaches conducting and choral literature and supervises the choral graduate conducting program for students pursuing the degrees Doctor of Arts or Master of Music. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, he earned the degree Doctor of Musical Arts in Conducting, including studies with choral, orchestral, and wind ensembles. Following studies at Temple University, he taught at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. As an undergraduate at The Ohio State University, Crow toured widely with the renowned Men's Glee Club under the direction of James Gallagher and performed frequently with Robert Shaw, seminal influences for a life in choral music.
Under Dr. Crow’s direction, Ball State choirs have a strong record of collaboration with professional artists, and they have been selected for prominent performances at national and regional conferences, including American Choral Directors Association and Intercollegiate Men’s Choruses. As a scholar, Crow has published and presented on a broad range of topics, such as choral intonation, score study, rehearsal techniques. He has written several articles for the series Teaching Music through Performance in Choir from GIA Publications. He is currently Associate Editor overseeing book reviews for The Choral Scholar and has guided fifteen doctoral dissertations.
Dr. Crow received the 2017 Mayor’s Arts Award for Arts Leadership in the Muncie community. Marking the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation, Crow conducted three of J.S. Bach’s Reformation cantatas with three different choirs and orchestras. From 2013 to 2018, Dr. Crow led Muncie’s Masterworks Chorale, a community chorus focusing especially choral/symphonic works. In May 2016, Masterworks Chorale premiered a cantata commissioned for Indiana Bicentennial celebrations. The text, assembled by members of the ensemble from local archives, celebrates Muncie’s role as Middletown USA. Each summer between 2011 and 2015, Crow led an intergenerational choir for a project called Musica in Situ that annually toured to perform choral music in historic and interesting architectural spaces. Some unusual concert venues include a space observatory, a library, and county courthouses in addition to numerous beautiful houses for worship. In 2014 and 2015 Musica in Situ was taught as an Immersive Learning course at Ball State for students from the School of Music and the College of Architecture and Planning. In the summer of 2008, Crow traveled to Austria on a research fellowship to explore church architecture relating to composer Anton Bruckner, whose Mass in E Minor served as the topic of his doctoral dissertation.
Crow is also an experienced singer, orchestral conductor, piano technician, and dedicated church musician, currently Director of Music at High Street United Methodist Church in Muncie, Indiana. He has previously served prominent churches in Philadelphia and Minneapolis. As a singer, he performed regularly with Apollo’s Fire, Cleveland’s professional baroque ensemble during his tenure there. In December 2012, Crow made his debut conducting the Muncie Symphony Orchestra for their holiday pops concert and returned to lead that event in 2017. Recent choral festivals have carried him to North Carolina, California, Ohio, and South Dakota as guest conductor.