Prichard, Laura

Laura Stanfield Prichard studied at Yale, Emory, and the University of Illinois; she holds master’s and doctoral degrees in choral conducting, library science, musicology, and education. She lectures regularly for the San Francisco and Chicago Symphonies and opera companies in Boston and San Francisco (since 1995). 

The Boston Musical Intelligencer sent her to Cuba in 2015 as a foreign correspondent, and she has reviewed concerts for them since 2010. She was the President of the Pacific Chapter of the College Music Society (1996-98) and Assistant Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus under Vance George (1995-2003). She and her husband Michael sing with the Boston and San Francisco Symphony Choruses. 

Her twenty-five continuous years of college teaching have focused on interdisciplinary cultural analysis of music, dance, and art history. Recent publications include editorial prefaces for orchestral scores (Musikproduktion Höflich, Munich, Germany), 650 translations of song and choral texts (www.lieder.net), and more than three dozen entries to the Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music (2012), the landmark revision of the multi-volume New Grove Dictionary of American Music (2013), the SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture (2019), and the forthcoming Music Around the World (2020). She was a finalist for the 2015 Pauline Alderman Award for outstanding writing on women and music and the 2019 Kurt Weill Award for writing on contemporary musical theater.