KBACH Interview with Carolyn Eynon
- CE Singers
- Nov 30, 2025
- 8 min read
KBACH's Greg Kostraba chatted on his Heart of the Arts podcast with Carolyn Eynon about her journey in choral music and about CES's upcoming holiday concerts on December 6 and 7. Get your tickets now!
This podcast episode aired on KBACH on November 30.
TRANSCRIPT:
GREG KOSTRABA: This is KBACH’s Heart of the Arts podcast. I’m Greg Kostraba. The Carolyn Eynon Singers will present their Holiday Classics and Carols concert Saturday, December 6th, at the Pinnacle Presbyterian Church Chapel; and Sunday, December 7th, at Camelback Christian Church. Carolyn Eynon is in the KBACH studios to chat about the program and the history of her ensemble. Welcome.
CAROLYN EYNON: Thank you. Great to be here, Greg.
GREG: It’s wonderful to have you here. Now, you’ve been directing choirs, I see, since elementary school. How does that happen? How did you get started?
CAROLYN: Well, I was born in a very wonderfully musical family from Czechoslovakia and Germany and England. And my father and mother were trained as professional musicians, but followed different career paths. My father became a car dealer because I was born in Detroit, but he was a professional violinist and an orchestra in Detroit. And my mother was a church organist and a pianist. So I was thrown into a wonderful environment at age five. I was put on the piano bench and the story continues.
I had a wonderful opportunity in high school. I was raised in Bloomfield Hills where there is a strong cultural energy and my high school senior year, I was given a six-week scholarship to study Oregon in Paris with Marcel Dupré, and I loved the experience and I thought I was going to be an organ major at the University of Michigan.
When I entered Ann Arbor, I was 17 and I loved, loved, loved practicing, but I didn’t love the loneliness of being in a studio practice room by myself for 4 to 6 hours. And that’s what it required of me. So, I discovered conducting when I was 17, and I was simply going into a regular required conducting 101 class. And I found it so exciting, so inspiring to work with the human voice. And so I became a singer when I was in college and all through high school too. I was in a select group and we sang in Europe. And I just love working with the human voice because it is such an individual gift to every person I’ve ever worked with.
GREG: Now when you started the doctoral program at U of M, you were the first woman in that program. Did you get any pushback?
CAROLYN: It wasn’t just pushback. I was the only woman and there were about seven men from all over the world who studied with a wonderful teacher, Gustaf Meyer, who unfortunately is deceased now. And so I was excited to be the only woman. I didn’t think of it as breaking the glass ceiling because no one had yet. The only two females that I knew of in 1978 to 1980 when I studied for my DMA were Margaret Hillis in Chicago and then my own teacher who was a conductor of orchestras, Elizabeth Green. There were no doctoral teachers, Greg, when I was 22 years old. They were all experienced choral directors, but none of them had a PhD. The DMA was a new animal in the academic area. So I was sort of I felt the guinea pig. There was one other man who was from another state who was my colleague, and we were the only two allowed in the DMA program. I stayed there for two years, finished my coursework, had a job as a director of a choir called the Southfield Madrigal Chorale in Detroit, and I had a high school choral job in Bloomfield Hills, Andover. So, I was ABD, never finished.
GREG: Just for our listeners, ABD means “all but dissertation.”
CAROLYN: Correct.
GREG: And a DMA is a doctor of musical arts. So, essentially a performance doctor. It’s the terminal degree for performance, whether you’re playing piano or whether you’re a conductor.
CAROLYN: Correct.
GREG: After your studies at the University of Michigan and you went on to the choral jobs that you had in Southeast Michigan, you came to Phoenix. How did that all happen and why?
CAROLYN: When I was much younger, 25 years ago, my husband, who is a retired home builder, decided that he was tired of snow, ice, and rain, and gray skies in Michigan. So, we took a vacation as a family with our three daughters and we came to beautiful Scottsdale and I fell in love with the terrain and he fell in love with the golf courses. We took a deep breath and one year later sold the house and moved here as a group, five of us, a dog and two cats and a guinea pig. And we planted ourselves in Scottsdale.
I had an interest in conducting, so I started a choir. The very first month I moved here, I was hired as the choir director for the Scottsdale Symphony. After one year of creating this community adult non-auditioned choir, I decided to research starting my own adult auditioned choir. And that was called then the Arizona Arts Chorale. And that was a great group of 60 or more. And we did three concerts a year, nonprofit 501c3. And in college, you never learn how to start a nonprofit. You learn by doing. So, I created a board of directors.
And 12 years later, I decided to form another smaller, more refined group, and that’s what I’m doing now with my own choir, Carolyn Eynon Singers, 28 auditioned adults, and we perform all over the Valley. Yesterday we sang for the Scottsdale Veterans Association and it was beautiful. And I have a great accompanist from Mesa. His name is Jason Neumann and he is my collaborative pianist and a wonderful friend and a good conductor and musician. So, we’re a happy team. I love what I do and I’ve done it nonstop.
GREG: And you have three [correction: two] concerts this upcoming season. The first one is in early December, a holiday classics and carols program. You’ve got some traditional favorites like Carol of the Bells and Deck the Halls and We Wish You a Merry Christmas, but I was hoping to focus on a piece you commissioned from Valley composer Mary Ellen Loose.
CAROLYN: I’m a very strong advocate for female composers. I have commissioned eight women in my lifetime here in Arizona and they have all been local in Arizona. And last year Mary Ellen and I discussed a theme, she being a composer/pianist in Mesa-Gilbert. She said to me, “I’ll choose the text,” and I gave her the theme of sun, moon, and stars. Her piece is called Celestial Symphony, written for harp, beautiful piano, windchimes, baritone soloist – and the baritone soloist is a master’s opera major at San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He is a board member of the Carolyn Eynon Singers board and he has a great future. His name is Jacob Soulliere and he is a strong baritone studied privately here in Carefree with Mary Sue Hyatt [who also sings with CES and is on the board]. He will join us on the solo that Mary Ellen Loose composed.
It also involves a children’s choir. So last year in March, we performed the whole symphony work. It’s one movement and we rented Camelback Bible and the Chandler Children’s Girls Chorus sang with us. So this year we’re repeating it because the singers loved it. In December we have a new harpist who is a local friend of mine from Carefree, Jocelyn Obermeyer, and she is performing with Jacob and my choir and we’re singing the children’s choir. Mary Ellen has a flare and her piano playing is articulate and excellent and passionate and it’s a great four-minute work and she loved it and I think the entire rehearsal process was extremely positive. She enjoyed my singers. She loves the performance result. Thank you for asking about her because she’s really talented.
GREG: Yeah. And I want to ask about another composer too, Linda Spevacek. You’ve got a piece of hers on your program as well. You’ve commissioned eight women, I think you’ve said to write, and two of them on this very concert.
CAROLYN: Yes. Linda and I know each other from ACDA, American Choral Directors Association. And I chose a very uplifting carol called the Irish Carol with handheld drum. And I’m privileged to have a very good percussionist in my choir. Her work is just simply joyful, and it’s about celebrating friendship and exchanging love. And my theme this year is called Season for Peace. And so all my works in all three concerts are reflective in some way of our hope for peace in our world this year.
GREG: What is special about conducting a holiday program?
CAROLYN: Well, since I’ve been raised in a lot of different faiths with many different church histories, I love researching music. And so I spend all summer programming. I rehearse from September through May with the Carolyn Eynon Singers. And then in June, July, and August, I concentrate on programming, commissioning, finding poetry that I love because when I approach a concert such as the holiday concert, I always try to reach many age levels because I feel that it is my opportunity and my privilege as a conductor to find music that touches someone’s heart at some point in the choir concert.
My goal with every singer is to connect with eye contact, with facial energy, with body language. My opportunity is changing around the singer’s formations. We sing “off book,” which means by memory, which is a challenge. These are employed singers who all have families, jobs, and lives other than just singing on Tuesday with me. But they love it so much when they’re together.
So when I have a Christmas or a holiday program, I do Hanukkah, I do European, and I do American, North American especially. And I find that the audiences are primed to be inspired. They come because it is the holiday and they bring their children. I often have kids from under five years old in the audience even though we might be tape recording or audio-visual recording. It’s still important to me as a past educator to reach out to all ages.
I have mostly singers from the ages of 22 to probably 50 which is a quite in today’s demographic that is quite a young adult choir. I’m much older than that and I know what it takes to create the energy and the passion at every rehearsal. I don’t ever let myself down. When I go home at 9:00, I need to know that I’ve done my very best.
GREG: Carolyn, thank you so much.
CAROLYN: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
GREG: Carolyn Eynon is the founder and director of the Carolyn Eynon Singers, which presents their Holiday Classics and Carols concerts Saturday, December 6th, at 3 at the Pinnacle Presbyterian Church Chapel; and Sunday, December 7th at 3 at Camelback Christian Church in Scottsdale. You can learn more about the Carolyn Eynon Singers at CEsingers.org. For the KBACH Heart of the Arts podcast, I’m Greg Kostraba.
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