2025-2026 All State Choir

Seighman to conduct 2026 All-State Choir

Dr. Gary Seighman is a Professor, Director of Choral Activities, and Chair of the Music Department at Trinity University in San Antonio, one of the nation’s top liberal arts universities. Under his direction, Trinity’s choirs have received numerous accolades, including invited performances at state, regional, and national conferences; tours throughout the United States and abroad; unique artistic collaborations; commercial recordings; and a third-place finish in the prestigious American Prize competition—the smallest college in the nation among the 12 finalists. A charismatic and passionate artist, Seighman is highly sought after as a clinician, guest conductor, and speaker. He was the sole recipient of the 2023 Innovative Concert Programming Award from the Texas Choral Directors Association. Since 2015, he has traveled to East Asia five times, conducting for the Peking University Summer Opera Program, leading graduate masterclasses in Taiwan, and guest conducting throughout China.

In 2019, he was an artist-in-residence at University College Dublin, with additional engagements in London, Cambridge, and Liverpool. A year earlier, he served as chorusmaster for the Classical Music Festival in Eisenstadt and Vienna. In June 2022, he made his Carnegie Hall debut conducting Mozart’s Requiem with the New York Chamber Orchestra and a choir of over 200 singers. He returned to Carnegie Hall in February 2023 to guest conduct the National High School Treble Choir and looks forward to his third appearance on that stage for the 2025 National Honor Choir Festival by WorldStrides. The summer of 2024 was once again spent in the U.K. and France, where his Trinity University Chamber Singers performed across the region, including Fauré’s Requiem at Église de la Madeleine and a choral evensong broadcast live from Winchester Cathedral.

As an arts advocate, Seighman is a regular grant evaluator for the Texas Commission on the Arts in Austin, TX. He served on the board of the DC/MD Choral Directors Association and was editor of the state newsletter. From 2021 to 2022, Seighman was a Public Humanities Faculty Fellow at Trinity University, where he collaborated with the Scobee Planetarium as a guest speaker for their sold-out program Music Inspired by the Northern Lights On a similar note, he and members of the Trinity Choir presented a work for choir and electronic medium at the College Music Society National Conference, drawing on astronomical data from the NASA Kepler Mission and traditional melodies of the Coahuiltecan people indigenous to South Texas. They were joined by musicians from the Tāp Pīlam Nation, and later that month, Seighman had the honor of being invited by the group’s elders to an early morning ceremony on their sacred burial grounds.

Seighman is a frequent panelist on the webinar series In the Teacher’s Lounge and has been interviewed on the Choralosophy Podcast. He has over a dozen publications in book chapters and peer-reviewed journals, a published conducting masterclass video with Forward Motion, and has presented over thirty interest sessions at state music educator conferences across the country. He holds degrees from Westminster Choir College, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Maryland. Always eager to explore new artistic and creative outlets, Seighman has been signed as a model/actor with Avant Agency since 2018 and has been featured in print, online, on billboards, and in radio and television. In his spare time, he coaches soccer, softball, and baseball for his 8- and 10-year-old children, Gabrielle and Justin.