Michael Wu, Organist
Michael Wu is the Director of Music at Faith United Methodist Church, Rockville. He holds degrees in Organ Performance and Church Music from the Peabody Conservatory, and from Northwestern University. This native Washingtonian has toured with American choirs and given organ recitals throughout the United States and the United Kingdom.
Michael is also a full-time faculty member at Landon School, Bethesda, Maryland, an all boys, non-sectarian college preparatory day school for grades 3-12. He teaches general music to grades 3 – 5, and he conducts six choral ensembles for boys in grades 3 through 8. His Landon choirs have been invited by audition to participate in the National Youth Choir Festival at Carnegie Hall, and have worked with notable musicians, including Maestro Leonard Slatkin of the National Symphony Orchestra, Charles Bruffy of the Phoenix and Kansas City Chorales, the American BoyChoir, and the Land of Lakes Choirboys. He has completed all four levels of OAKE certification coursework at Westminster Choir College, and the first three levels of CME certification at Ithaca College.
Beyond Landon and Faith, Mr. Wu serves as Conductor of the Bel Canto Chorus of the Children’s Chorus of Washington (CCW), founded and led by Artistic Director Joan Gregoryk. The ensemble, in its eighth year, is an intermediate level choir in the CCW program, and it includes over 30 students ranging from grades 4 to 9. Bel Canto Chorus was the featured children’s choir in John Rutter’s Mass of the Children, conducted by the composer in DC in 2007. The group has toured Chicago, New York and Philadelphia; it has collaborated with the Thomas Circle Singers, the Washington Mastersingers, American University, and the Columbia Union College Orchestra, and it has participated in the Appalachian Young Voices Choral Festival in Charleston, West Virginia.
He is a Children’s Choirs Standards and Repertoire Chair for the American Choral Directors Association (Maryland/DC Chapter), he has given presentations for ACDA and the Maryland Music Educators Association, and he has composed original music for choirs and bells, and arranged hymns for brass, organ, choir and congregation (member ASCAP). He has served as clinician and adjudicator for choir festivals in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland, he has taught choral music teacher training for Baltimore County Public Schools and through the CCW in-service program May 2013, and he is a guest clinician on changing voices at Shenandoah University, Summer 2014.