Kay Hoke

Kay Hoke joined the Sunderman Conservatory of Music as its Director in August of 2008. The summer of 2008 also marked Dr. Hoke's twelfth year as an educational consultant and national workshop leader for Music! Words! Opera!, a program under the auspices of Opera America which takes her to regional opera companies throughout the United States and to Vancouver, BC. A collaboration with Pulitzer Prize winning composer Robert Ward entitled The American Music Theatre Project: A Study of Three Contemporary One-Act Operas is forthcoming, and she regularly provides essays and synopses on operas for Indianapolis Opera and other companies. Another ongoing project is work on a volume about Douglas Moore's opera based on several colorful characters from Colorado history, The Ballad of Baby Doe, for the series, Sourcebooks in American Music. She has served on the board of the College Music Society, chaired its Committee on the Status of Women, and was director of a CMS Institute on Women, Music & Gender held at Indiana University. Until her move to North Carolina, she was the principal lecturer for Indianapolis Opera and the pre-concert speaker for the Ensemble Music Society of Indianapolis. While living in North Carolina, she gave preview talks for Opera Carolina in Charlotte and will continue as a program annotator for the Brevard Music Center.

A native of North Carolina, Dr. Hoke holds degrees from the University of Kentucky, where she began her path towards musicology as a student of Rey Longyear, and the University of Iowa. She studied piano with Robert Darnell and James Bonn, harpsichord with Naomi Rowley, and Baroque performance practices with Robert Donington before shifting focus, first to musicology and theory, and later to music administration. Previously the Chair of the Division of Fine Arts at Brevard College and professor of music at Butler University, she has been an enthusiastic teacher of graduate and undergraduate music theory and history courses as well as special seminars and honors courses on a wide range of topics.