Office Directory
Dr. Don R. Campbell
| TITLE: | Professor Emeritus of Music |
| DEPARTMENT: | Faculty Emeriti |
| EMAIL: | Send an Email |
| PROFILE: | Don Campbell is Professor of Music, Director of Choral Activities, and Music Department Coordinator at Southern Wesleyan University in Central, South Carolina. Prior to his appointment to SWU in 1998, he taught vocal music for 20 years at Redwood High School in Visalia, California—building the program to 300 students in five choirs. Dr. Campbell received his Bachelor of Arts degree in music education from California State University, Fullerton, his Master of Arts degree in choral conducting from California State University, Fresno, and his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in choral conducting from Arizona State University. His mentors include David Thorsen, Howard Swan, John Cooksey, Greg Lyne, David Stocker, and many others. In demand as a choral clinician, Dr. Campbell has traveled to sixteen states as well as and Scotland, The Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and British Columbia and Ontario, Canada to conduct choirs and festival choruses and present choral clinics. He has conducting students in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Italy, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea. Every year he conducts the South Carolina Music Educators Association’s Western Region Honor Choir and had for many years also conducted the Upper Region and Central Region Honor Choirs. His choirs have performed at conventions of the American Choral Directors Association and Music Educators National Conference. He is the founder and host of five festivals for local school and church choirs at Southern Wesleyan University: Upstate Intercollegiate Choral Invitational Festival for college choirs, SWUFest for high school choirs (which has grown so much in popularity that it has had to be split into two different days, SWUFest Too for middle school choirs, and Musica Ecclesia for church choirs. In addition to the many eclectic programs he has directed in his forty-six years of work, he has conducted choral/orchestral works including Giuseppi Verdi’s Requiem, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, F.J. Haydn’s Harmoniemesse, Howard Hanson’s Song of Democracy, Beethoven’s, Mass in C major and the choral movement of the Ninth Symphony, Haydn’s Te Deum, Brahms’ Schicksalslied and an orchestrated version of the Liebeslieder Waltzer, Cherubini’s Requiem, Handel’s Messiah, Brahms’ A German Requiem, Duruflé’s Requiem, Fauré’s Requiem, Rutter’s Requiem and Gloria, Mozart’s Requiem, Schubert’s Masses in G and B flat and Schubert’s Magnificat, Vivaldi’s Gloria, Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Purcell’s Come Ye Sons of Art, Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom and Frostiana, G.P. Pergolesi’s Magnificat and P.D.Q Bach’s The Seasonings. He has had post-doctoral coaching in orchestral conducting as a Conducting Fellow at the Conductors Institute of South Carolina with Donald Portnoy, Paul Vermel, Peter Jaffe, Maurice Peress, Manuel Alvarez, Victoria Bond, Samuel Jones, and John Fitz Rogers. Dr. Campbell is currently the conductor of the Chorale of the Greater Anderson Musical Arts Consortium (GAMAC), a fine civic chorale in Anderson, South Carolina. As a barbershopper, he has directed Visalia, California’s Mighty Oak Chorus, Hanford, California’s Kingsmen Chorus, and Spartanburg, South Carolina’s Palmetto Statesmen Chorus and has been on the international faculty of Harmony University for the Barbershop Harmony Society for twenty-four years and has been the Dean of the Directors College of Harmony University since 2015. He is also a member of American Choral Directors Association, South Carolina American Choral Directors Association, Music Educators National Conference, South Carolina Music Educators Association, National Association of Teachers of Singing, and the Barbershop Harmony Society. His other affiliations are with Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia (Professional Music Fraternity), Phi Kappa Phi (Honorary Scholastic Society), and Pi Kappa Lambda (Honorary Music Scholastic Society), As a church musician, Dr. Campbell has directed music at several churches in California and South Carolina including his current position as Director of Music at Trinity United Methodist Church in Anderson, South Carolina. He has also had lead roles in community theatre productions of Man of La Mancha and Fiddler on the Roof. He is recipient of the first Ken Dickens Award for Excellence in Teaching for 2003 at Southern Wesleyan University and SWU’s Faculty Member of the Year for 2003-4. Additional honors include having been president of the South Carolina American Choral Directors Association, being named Dean of the Directing College of Harmony University, posting a conducting video on YouTube called “Directors Stop Talking,” and contributing to the book, Visions of Excellence: a Dialog with the Finest Directors from the Barbershop Harmony Society.
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