Dr. Charles Beale joins NYCGMC as its Music Director having recently served as Musical Director of the London Gay Men’s Chorus since 2002. In that time, LGMC has grown from around 80 to over 200 members and is now the largest gay arts organisation in Europe. LGMC has a deserved reputation for the openness, diversity and innovation of its repertoire, the passion and commitment of its singers and its groundedness in the gay communities of London and the UK. LGMC is an open access, non-audition mixed ability chorus with small and large ensembles, and regularly sells out the best concert halls in London, such as the Barbican Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Singing everything from Jan Sandstrom to Kylie Minogue, from high opera to political song, from the latest dance music with backing tracks to a cappella part songs, recent tours have also taken them to the Sydney Opera House, the Various Voices Festival in Paris 2005 and the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC. Here, Charles closed the show by conducting a combined choir including members of Washington DC and Heartlands Gay Men’s choruses in his own arrangement of ‘Come What May’.

Originally trained as an organist, Charles studied at Cambridge, England, where he conducted chapel choir three times a week for 3 years from 1982-85. He did his first degree in classical music, while running the University Big Band in his spare time. After 2 years as a high school teacher, he specialised in jazz performance at Masters level at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where he won the Rose Morris Prize as a composer and jazz pianist in 1989. Charles has a stylistically diverse and active freelance performing career. He recently directed members of the London Philarmonic Orchestra in an improvised performance at one of London's major concert halls. His playing has also included national radio broadcasts as a classical pianist in Stravinsky’s ‘Paroles Tisses’, an organ concerto with the UK's National Youth Jazz Orchestra, West End theatre work on shows including ‘An Evening with Anthony Newley’ and ‘Sweet Lorraine’. He has playing and arranging credits on albums and singles by pop and dance artists including Whitney Houston and Adeva, and gigs regularly on the London jazz scene, with the likes of Bobby Wellins and the Frank Williams African Jazz Quintet.

Singing and the voice has become a growing specialisation as both performer and educator since he began at the London Gay Men’s Chorus, and this is gradually replacing jazz as his main career focus. He was an active member of the UK’s Association of British Choral Directors, where he gives clinics, and is committed to the cause of GALA, giving clinics at the 2004 Gala Music Director’s Retreat and at GALA 2004 itself. He is currently co-writing a new ‘Voiceworks’ book for Oxford University Press with a fellow GALA MD, and has written a number of sets of arrangements for Faber’s acclaimed Choral Basics’ series, including ‘Disco Classics’, ‘Frankly speaking’ (A Sinatra selection) and ‘All that Jazz’ (a ‘Chicago’ selection). He also designed the artistic strategy for London’s winning bid to host Various Voices 2009, Europe’s equivalent to GALA.

Charles has a burgeoning career as an educator and academic. While in London, he taught 2 days a week at the Royal College of Music in London, one of London’s international level conservatoires, where he was Area leader for Aural training, taught history and arranging, and was Professor of Jazz Piano and directed the Royal College of Music Big Band. Since completing his Ph.D. in 2001, he has written a critically acclaimed book 'Jazz Piano from Scratch', and a number of important academic articles, including the chapter on Jazz Education in the recent Oxford Companion to Jazz.

He was Lead Jazz Consultant to the Associated Board for ten years from 1996, helping design new exam syllabuses in jazz worldwide. He also trains and moderates examiners and adjudicators, facilitates workshops and seminars for classroom and instrumental teachers and was nominated for a prestigious national Jazz Parliamentary Award in 2005 for services to jazz education. In the past 10 years, he has toured internationally, adjudicating, examining and doing workshops for teachers in the UK, the US, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia and Singapore.

Committed to the cause of gay rights, Charles has been with his Singaporean Indian partner now for 15 years. Both have benefited from the power of gay activism. Early in their relationship, they were part of the ‘Stonewall Immigration Group’, a political organisation that eventually won its campaign for the UK government to allow the foreign national in a same-sex couple to be allowed ‘resident’ status in the UK on the basis of their relationship.

Chip Prince, NYCGMC accompanist. As a seventh-grader in Lancaster, New Hampshire, Chip was roped into playing the piano for his junior-high chorus and liked it so much that he continued accompanying choirs through high school and "far too many years of college" at Brigham Young University. Since then he has conducted and played keyboards in Broadway and Off-Broadway shows such as Les Misérables, Ragtime, Fermat's Last Tango, Grey Gardens, The Fantasticks, Titanic, and Baz Luhrmann’s La Bohème. Between Broadway gigs he collaborates with cabaret artists Evangelia Kingsley and Mary Setrakian as music director/pianist. Chip has recently sung tenor professionally as a member of the 2006 Bard Festival Chorus. As an amateur he has sung with Harold Rosenbaum’s Canticum Novum Singers (including appearances in Peter Schickele’s P. D. Q. Bach concerts), the One World Symphony Chorus, the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, and Nelly Vuksic’s Americas Vocal Ensemble. Chip’s partner of over ten years is John Bauder.

Tom McGillis has been the principal sign language interpreter for NYCGMC since 1988. His other artistic signing credits include Christmas Revels and several productions with Very Special Arts Theatre Company, the George Street Playhouse and the Paper Mill Playhouse. Tom has voice-interpreted signed productions, including Progress at the Hudson Guild Theatre and Handstone Productions' Anna and Danilo. He studied artistic interpretation at the Juilliard School. He has presented workshops for GALA Choruses, addressing interpreting issues for choral performances. By day, Tom is Vice President of Human Resources for Guideline, Inc., a global business advisory firm. Tom also serves on several business advisory boards, and is a dedicated advocate for individuals with disabilities, in employment, education, and the arts.