Dr. Randall Sheets

Education

• Bachelor of Music in Organ Performance
  Birmingham-Southern College

• Master of Music in Organ Performance
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Doctor of Musical Arts in Choral Conducting and Literature
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Biography

Randall Sheets, instructor of organ, has wide-ranging experience in performance, conducting, and music pedagogy. In addition to part-time teaching at USA, he is full-time Director of Music Ministries and Organist at Spring Hill Presbyterian Church in Mobile, where he has served since 2002. Previously Dr. Sheets taught for seventeen years as professor of music at Union College in Kentucky, with duties as director of choirs and instructor in organ, voice, music literature, conducting, theory, aural skills, and church music. He has been active as recitalist, guest conductor, clinician, and choral/vocal adjudicator and teaches private organ and voice. Since his junior year in high school he has been active, part-time or full-time, as a church musician.

Dr. Sheets’s doctoral dissertation won second place in the Julius Herford Dissertation Competition sponsored by the American Choral Directors Association. His edition of a collection of motets and sacred concertos by Melchior Franck (1631) was published as a volume in the A-R Editions series Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, and his reviews and articles have been published in The Choral Journal, the Journal of the American Dalcroze Society, and church music journals. He has served as organist with the Mobile Symphony and is sub-dean of the local chapter of the American Guild of Organists. His performance and teaching are informed by his extensive study of the approach to music learning known as Dalcroze eurhythmics, in which he is certified through the Marta Sanchez Dalcroze Training Center at Carnegie-Mellon University.

His primary teachers have been James Dorroh, Jerald Hamilton and Warren Hutton, (organ); George Hunter (harpsichord); Chester Alwes, Harold Decker, Louis Halsey, Hugh Thomas, and Paul Vermel (conducting). Through singing in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus, Dr. Sheets had the opportunity to learn from Robert Shaw. During doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he was chorusmaster, coach, and conductor with the university Opera Theatre and director of the university Madrigal Singers