ABOUT CHOIR CENTRAL

Gary Photo

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FOUNDER

Gary Smith graduated as a music teacher from The Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He was introduced to choral music at school and sang bass in Richard Gill’s Conservatorium Singers, St Mary’s Cathedral Choir directed by David Russell and the Singers of St Laurence with Neil McEwen. Gary studied piano with Isador Goodman and jazz with Roger Frampton and Bob Bertles. He worked in Sydney as a high school music teacher for 27 years before starting his first community choir in 2000. Gary also founded several acclaimed acappella groups, some of which have toured internationally to South East Asia and The Edinburgh Festival.

He currently directs 4 community choirs in Sydney and leads cultural tours to Europe when these are possible.

CHOIR CENTRAL

In 2008, The Cleftomaniacs community choir under Gary's direction, presented the Sydney Acappella Festival at Sydney’s Seymour Centre. A website was built by a team of supporters to help promote the festival, and this provided the inspiration for a more adventurous project to help connect the many choirs and a cappella groups around Australia. This eventually became Acappella Central.

This website has been a benefit to the choral community of Australia for over a decade, offering free listing opportunities for hundreds of choirs and all of their performances plus information about workshops and courses, singing teachers, choir festivals and events.

Now recognised as a primary source of information about choral groups and their activities, Acappella Central has recently been refined, redesigned and rebranded as Choir Central in order to be more inclusive of the many choirs around Australia that do not consider themselves strictly a c a p p e l l a .