Beginning with a core group of six children who met in a private home, CCM quickly expanded to become a respected and innovative program of choral music education, a thriving conservatory with three performing choruses and ten graded levels of instruction, offering performance opportunities equal to the children’s musical accomplishments and to the organization’s curriculum standards.
For many years, CCM was one of very few choral music education programs in the country which offered separate musicianship training classes in addition to chorus rehearsals, and which met twice per week in order to give ample attention to all aspects of music literacy and performance, ensuring that students had sufficient practice to attain mastery of core concepts. CCM has been a leader in the field, serving as a model for several other children’s choral music education groups as they created their own musicianship programs.
Arts programs and arts teachers bear the brunt of substantial cuts in federal education funding.
Seeking initially to provide her own musically-talented child with a fulfilling choral experience, Betty Bertaux starts CCM with six children.
CCM is proclaimed by Governor William Schaefer to be the designated Children’s Chorus in the state of Maryland.
Crickets is a fun, play-based music and movement class for children ages 4 to 6. Trained teachers engage the body and the mind in joyful music-making through musical games and movement.
At CCM’s initiative and under Betty Bertaux’s leadership, a training program for music educators and choral conductors is developed and launched, called the American Kodály Institute at Loyola College Maryland (now Loyola University).
These initiatives started in 2009 with Sing it Forward and has continued with performances benefitting Empower4Life, Children’s House at John’s Hopkins, and Blessings in a Backpack. Our support of BiB continues in 2022, four years after the initial benefit concert. We have participated in decorating a tree for Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Festival of Trees as well.
The initial program worked in conjunction with the American Kodály Institute.
CCM began its own K-2 summer camp, Music in the Meadow, in 2015.
The 2014-2015 season finds CCM in a newly renovated space to call its own. Read more.
Our founder, Betty Bertaux, passes away. Read more.
CCM celebrated its 40th anniversary with an exciting Spring Concert, 40 Years of Song! Conducted by Artistic Director Susan Bialek, with special guests and collaborators including members of the Handel Choir of Baltimore as well as a local area string ensemble and professional harpist. CCM students were also joined by a choir of alumni spanning nearly the whole of CCM’s history.
The grant, titled “Awakening the Natural Musician in Your Child,” will support the distribution of educational articles and fund music demonstration events for families and music teachers in the Baltimore region. Read more and check out our series of articles found News.
As one board member shared, “we are here, we have mastered this virtual thing, and we are learning and singing and HAVING FUN!” Read more.
CCM celebrates its 46th Annual Winter Concert, Gather! Our first indoor, in-person concert in 732 days through a statewide lockdown due to the 2019 Coronavirus pandemic. Our students did not disappoint!
An authority on vocal and musical development in children, Betty was internationally recognized both for her expertise as a pedagogue, and for her extensive contributions to choral music literature. Her compositions and arrangements for children’s voices, published as the Betty Bertaux Choral Series by Boosey and Hawkes and by several other publishers, have been a staple of children’s choral music for more than 40 years, and are known to music educators around the world. In addition to her own contributions to the repertoire, Betty also commissioned significant works for children’s chorus by other composers, including “Miracles” by Theodore Morrison and “A Midge of Gold” by Elam Sprenkle.
Betty received her Master of Music with Kodály Emphasis from Holy Names College in 1975, where she also taught Kodály methodology and supervised student teaching. In 1992 she received a Masters of Music in Composition from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, continuing her post graduate education with studies in Gordon Music Learning Theory, Voice Care, and Musicianship Pedagogy. In 2001 she was awarded the Doctor of Music Education Honoris Causa by VanderCook College of Music. In addition to her work as Artistic and Education Director for CCM, Betty was a member of the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory, Holy Names College, and Baltimore County Public Schools Program for the Gifted and Talented. She was frequently invited to be a featured presenter at state, national and international conferences, and to serve as a guest conductor, choral adjudicator and vocal clinician for children’s choirs and festivals. In recognition of more than 50 years of contribution to the field of music education, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Organization of American Kodály Educators in 2011.
In a 1986 interview with the The Evening Sun, Betty said, “A singer has a responsibility to be musically literate just as much as an orchestral member. I thought we needed a children’s choir which offered good choral performance but also a solid program of training. Well, you know how they say, ‘Somebody ought to do this’? I decided I was going to be the one to do this.”
Colleague and friend Patricia Amato, who has also been the chorus’ pianist since 1981, says “Her living legacy are the children of the Children’s Chorus of Maryland and the continuing generations of children. She had respect for the children and the art of the music that she encouraged them to make. Her former students are all over the country and the world. The effect she had was far-reaching and broad.” CCM faculty member Lauren McDougle sums up Betty’s deep regard for her students, as she recollects the moment that Betty told her, “I know they’re just children, but we must never underestimate the depth of their souls.”
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