First Parish Music Staff

Music Director, Laura Stanfield Prichard
Laura Stanfield Prichard has directed our music program since 2003, during which we have led significant relief efforts and reconstruction trips to the UU churches of New Orleans. The First Parish Choir and Chalice Singers Youth Choirs have collaborated with groups including the U. S. Slave Song Project and NAACP Spirituals Choir (dir. by Jim Thomas), the Vineyard Community Chorus (dir. Peter Boak), and the UU choirs of Montréal, Newburyport, Stow and Acton, Winchester, and Vineyard Haven. Laura has been a guest conductor for UU choirs in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Washington D. C., and she was the Director of Music for the Mt. Diablo UU Church of Walnut Creek, CA from 1998-2003 (Rev. David Sammons, minister). Members of our music program will travel over the 2012 Memorial Day weekend to reconnect and collaborate with musicians at the UU Socity of Martha's Vineyard.

Our program has grown to include an Adult Choir which sings most Sundays, an Intergenerational Orchestra, three youth choirs (also playing Choirchime handbells), an annual coffeehouse in May, a choral commissioning progam, and chamber music groups led by church members (UUlations, UUphonics, Jazz Combo, Woodwind Quintet, Flute Loops and Clarinet Flash Mob). The UUlations (Jennifer Kobayashi, dir.) have provided music at other UU congegations such as Groton, Newton, and the Mass Bay UU Choir Festival.

Laura has taught Music in Western Civilization and Humanities classes at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell since 2005, and speaks regularly for the Boston Baroque, Boston Ballet, Chicago Symphony, and San Francisco Symphony. She is a part-time faculty member of the Dana Hall School of Music in Wellesley and Merriam School in Acton, teaching private lessons in clarinet, oboe, guitar, and voice, and group classes in chorus, drum ensemble, and American folk dance. She has enjoyed working with the Winchester Cooperative Theater for children as Pianist and Music Director since 2009.

Laura was the Director of Fine Arts for the Arlington Schools in 2008-09 and holds teaching and supervisory licenses for all eight arts and humanities subjects in MA. She has conducted gold and silver medal-winning groups in Cambridge (grades 3-8), Dracut (7-8), Lexington (6-8), Lynn (9-12), and Marlborough (9-12), led the choral progams at Lawrence Academy of Groton and Marin Catholic High School (Kentfield, CA), and taught instrumental/music theory lessons at St. Agnes School (Arlington), St. Charles School (Woburn) and Diamond Middle School (Lexington).

She led the Newton-based Sharing a New Song Chorus on collaborative concert tours of South Africa and Vietnam and conducted the Yale Alumni Chorus in Moscow and the Netherlands. From 2003-2006, she conducted the award-winning Sängerchor Boston, the oldest German-language choir in the US, and has been a Slavic diction coach and accompanist for the New World Chorale. She and her husband Mike perform regularly with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, the New World Chorale, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

A graduate of Yale University and the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, she was a tenured faculty member in music and dance at California State University-East Bay (Hayward) and San Francisco State University for eight years, and presented regular lectures at the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, and New Century Chamber Orchestra. She publishes editorial prefaces for the Musikproduktion Höflich in Munich, Germany, recently presented a paper for the 2011 Diaghilev P. S. conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, and has forthcoming articles on music in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music and the New Grove Dictonary of American Music. This is her eighth year as Director of Music for First Parish Arlington, and she would be happy to hear from you if you'd like to contribute to our program in any way.
Email laura@firstparish.info

Organist and Pianist, Sarah Haera Tocco
Since her successful debut in 1986 as an accompanist at Carnegie Weill Recital Hall, for which the New York Times cited her as a "sensitive pianist," Sarah Tocco has performed in Rome, Jamaica, California, New York, Louisiana, and Massachusetts, as well as toured Cuba, Russia, Mongolia, Brazil, and Vietnam with Sharing a New Song, a community chorus based in Newton. She coached the Vietnam National Opera and Ballet Chorus in Hanoi and Haiphong and played Chopin on Vietnamese national television. She accompanied SANS throughout Brazil (including Rio de Janeiro, Ouro Preto, Salvador de Bahia) and was a piano soloist in the historic opera house in Manaus, on the Amazon.

Ms. Tocco has made concerto appearances with the Moorpark College Symphony and the California State University – Los Angeles Symphony and given solo recitals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and repeat performances for the acclaimed concert series at the Newton (MA) Free Library. She holds both undergraduate and master's degrees in Performance Piano from the Manhattan School of Music in New York and is completing a doctorate in Piano at Boston University. Ms. Tocco performs frequently through out New England area, both as soloist and accompanist, and currently has her debut CD release with the music of Brahms, Chopin and Schubert -- an offering that is becoming a music lover's favorite. She continues to demonstrate her deep, expressive interpretation of Romantic music on stage, and is maintains a large studio of piano students as a faculty member of the Winchester Music School.

She has with four local choral groups: the Broad Cove Choral, Unicorn Singers, Sharing a New Song, and Boston College High Choir (including their tours of Italy), along with her frequent solo and chamber recitals. Her most recent solo concert at First Parish Arlington was Sunday, Sept. 28, 2008, and she will perform a solo faculty recital at the Winchester Music School on February 12, 2012.
Email sarah@firstparish.info