Laney Armstrong

Laney McClain Armstrong is a singer and conductor who has made choral music and education her life's work. As a conductor and educator, Dr. Armstrong strives to cultivate a love of music in each singer through quality programming, building skills and musicianship, and devotion to the music and texts. She has toured internationally with the San Francisco Girls Chorus and the Harvard University Choir as a singer, and was one of the founding members of the Choral Fellows program at Harvard University in 2001. She received a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship in 2009 while a student at the University of Washington that supported her study of the Estonian language and culture. As part of her fellowship, she assisted in cataloging entries in the University of Washington's Baltic Choral Collection. Dr. Armstrong has worked with singers of many ages, teaching middle school and high school, serving as the Associate Artistic Director and Director of Musicianship at the Cantabile Youth Singers of Silicon Valley, and working in many capacities at the San Francisco Girls Chorus. She also had a successful tenure as the Artistic Director of the treble vocal ensemble, Musae, based in San Francisco. Most recently, she worked as the Director of Choral Studies at the San Francisco Girls Chorus.

Dr. Armstrong holds a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in Afro-American Studies and a Masters of Music in Choral Conducting from the University of Oregon under the direction of Dr. Sharon Paul. In 2013, she received a Doctorate in Musical Arts in Choral Conducting from the University of Washington, where she studied with Dr. Geoffrey Boers and Dr. Giselle Wyers. Her dissertation, entitled "From the mouth and from the heart: the Spiritual Folksongs of Cyrillus Kreek," explores the life of the Estonian composer and his arrangements of folk hymns, with a focus on those written for treble voices. Dr. Armstrong holds a Level I Certification in Kodaly teaching and has prepared singers to sing with the San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Symphony, and San Francisco-based Opera Parallel.

When she is not making music, Dr. Armstrong enjoys reading, knitting, crochet, and spending time with her husband and four children.