Music Director
Dr. Stephen Spinelli
“I am deeply honored to be named the next Music Director of the Back Bay Chorale. From the very first moments of rehearsal through the joy we shared in performance, it was clear to me that this is a thoughtful, talented, and generous organization. Larry Hill founded the Back Bay Chorale with a commitment to community, social justice, and the transformative power of music.
I am excited to continue this legacy, striving for the highest levels of musical excellence while ensuring our performances serve as a beacon of community connection. Through creative programming and robust outreach initiatives, we will enrich the lives of our members and uphold the Chorale’s tradition of being a vital and leading participant in Boston's musical and cultural landscape.”
– Dr. Stephen Spinelli
Dr. Stephen Spinelli is the Back Bay Chorale's sixth Music Director, effective July 1, 2024. He is Director of Choral Studies at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, serving there since 2022. There, he leads the Boston Conservatory Chorale and Chamber Choir, and oversees the graduate program in choral conducting. Spinelli previously served as the Assistant Director of Choral Programs at Cornell University, and held visiting appointments at Thomas Jefferson University, Moravian College, Villanova University, and Syracuse University.
Dr. Spinelli has sung with some of the country’s leading vocal ensembles. As a tenor with the Crossing, his credits include the 2018 Grammy Award®–winning recording of Gavin Bryars’ The Fifth Century. Spinelli also performed with Brad Wells’ genre-bending vocal octet: Roomful of Teeth. He assisted in the production of their Grammy Award–winning debut album, which yielded the Pulitzer Prize®–winning recording of Caroline Shaw’s Partita for Eight Voices. As a frequently engaged guest conductor, he particularly cherishes his experiences leading the Maui Chamber Orchestra and Chorus.
Dr. Spinelli is a co-founder of ONEcomposer, a non-profitorganization dedicated to research, publication, performance, and recording in celebration of historically excluded musical voices. ONEcomposer’s collaboration with the Philadelphia Orchestra to present the original orchestration of Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement was hailed as “a knockout” by The Philadelphia Inquirer. On July 26, 2024, ONEcomposer released Beyond the Years: Unpublished Songs of Florence Price, the organization’s inaugural commercial recording, featuring previously unpublished and unrecorded art songs of Florence Price as performed by soprano Karen Slack and pianist Michelle Cann. The album was awarded the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. Dr. Spinelli curated and created all editions for this project from sources gathered at the Library of Congress, UPenn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, and the Special Collections at the University of Arkansas. He also authored the liner notes and co-produced the album. All editions created for this project are now available on the ONEcomposer website.
Spinelli was a Beinecke Library Research Fellow at Yale University from 2022–2023, where he investigated the creative partnership between Langston Hughes and Margaret Bonds. He was recently named an Ecker Fellow by the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, through which he will investigate the phenomena of public memory and amnesias as they relate to historical exclusion in the field of music. Spinelli holds degrees from Williams College, Temple University, and Northwestern University.