Everything Band: Episode 148 - Mary Kate McNally

Mary Kate McNally is the Director of Athletic bands at Ohio Wesleyan University, a co-founder of the And We Were Heard project, and a tireless advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the band community.

Topics:

• The band program at Ohio Wesleyan University, Mary Kate’s musical origin story, and a high school band director that had a tremendous influence on her career.
• Gender stereotypes in musical instruments and what we can do to help our boys feel comfortable with playing any instruments.
• Advice for working with transgender and nonbinary students and creating meaningful dialogues to best serve all of our communities.
• The Twin Bands of Kent State in the 1940s and being willing to learn from our mistakes and grow as music educators.
• Mary Kate’s experiences teaching in rural Eastern Colorado and some strategies for differentiating instruction when you have homogeneous students at different levels.
• A report on And We Were Heard a year after its founding.

Links:

• Ohio Wesleyan University
• And We Were Heard
• Ray Chapa’s Clarinet Gymnastics
• Holst: Second Suite in F

Biography:

Mary Kate McNally has been the Director of Athletic Bands at Ohio Wesleyan University since the fall of 2017. Under her leadership, the university's marching band performed in the fall of 2018 for the first time in almost six decades. Mary Kate earned her Bachelor of Music Education summa cum laude and with honors from Henderson State University in 2012 and her Master of Music in Wind Band Conducting from Kent State University in 2017. She was a public school teacher in Colorado for three years, where she was the K-12 music teacher for a small rural school district. She is an active member of the professional band directing community with memberships in the National Association for Music Education, the Ohio Music Education Association, and the College Band Directors National Assocation. She is also a board member for And We Were Heard, a digital recording project dedicated to promoting wind band works by underrepresented composers. Mary Kate is a self-professed crochet addict and lives with her hedgehog, Maestro.
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