Heather MacLaughlin-Garbes

Heather MacLaughlin Garbes received her Doctorate of Musical Arts degree at the University of Washington. While at UW, she helped to develop and maintain the UW Baltic Choral Library, the first collection of its kind in the United States. This research has allowed her to present at College Music Society’s National and International Conferences, AABS conferences, the Baltic Musics and Musicology Conference in Canterbury, England and The Latvian Archive and Material Culture Conference at the Library of Congress. She has recently published her work in the chapter “Baltic Languages: Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian” in the book The Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet in the Choral Rehearsal (Scarecrow Press), a collaborative effort with Dr. Duane Karna and Andrew Schmidt. Dr. MacLaughlin Garbes has worked at Lake Forest College and The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University and serves on the board of the Greater Seattle Choral Consortium and the Washington State American Choral Directors Association, as well as on the international initiatives and performance national committees of the College Music Society. She is the conductor of the Mägi Ensemble, a professional women’s vocal ensemble that performs and records music from the Baltic regions as well as the conductor of the Seattle Finnish Choral Society.