The Contra Costa Chorale is pleased to announce that a new Artistic Director has been hired for the upcoming year. Following the sudden death of Cindy Beitmen, a search launched in May resulted in a fine array of talented potential successors. Of these, the standout for all who participated in the search, including Chorale members who auditioned the top three candidates, was Dr. Brad Schultz, who is already hard at work finalizing the Fall 2024 concert program.

A native of Minnesota, Brad’s musical background includes vocal and instrumental performance and conducting, church and community music making, university teaching and public musicology. Brad is also the director of music at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere, where he is organist, choir director, and artistic director of the concert series.

Before arriving in the Bay Area, Brad served United Methodist, Unitarian Universalist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian congregations in Oregon, Iowa, Minnesota, Idaho, and Georgia. He holds a Ph.D. in Musicology and Performance Practice from the University of Oregon. His dissertation focuses on the keyboard works of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, a composer active in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, through lenses of embodied cognition, rhetoric, and organology (the study of musical instruments). He also holds an MM in Organ Performance from Emory University and a BA in Music from Luther College.

Brad teaches online music courses for the University of Oregon and previously served on the faculty of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He performs most regularly as an organist, collaborative keyboardist and continuo player, and conductor, and enjoys making music with other musicians in the Bay Area.

We welcome Brad to the Contra Costa Chorale community and hope that this will be the beginning of an inspiring and musically rewarding relationship for all. We invite you to mark your calendars for Brad’s inaugural concert performances with the Chorale on December 6, 2024 at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley in Kensington and December 8 at Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church. 

The fall program, with a working title of “Beethoven, Brahms and the Viennese Influence,” will feature works by composers who lived, worked and breathed the inspirational air in Vienna, in tribute to one of the greatest musical cities as well as to former Artistic Director Cindy Beitmen, who herself spent several formative years working there.