We are excited and honored to be serving this congregation as music directors and wanted to take this opportunity to reach out for your thoughts and ideas regarding church music. If you are interested in giving ofyour time and talent by performing music for worship services, please do let us know! We are happy for you toplay or sing, solo or in groups, and this is a wonderful opportunity for you to give to your congregation and share music that excites you. We can help you connect your musical offerings to upcoming service themes. For those who are not musicians, we still welcome your requests and suggestions for music you would like to hear during service, be that a favorite hymn, or a particular instrument, piece, or style for special music offerings. We look forward to getting to know everyone better in the coming months!
Scott Millichamp
I am excited to join with Sonja as your new music directors! I moved to Midland in 2009 to begin a position with the Midland-Odessa Symphony and Chorale as their Co-Principal horn and Lone Star Brass hornist. In December of last year I also became the Personnel Manager of the MOSC, and I am now additionally teaching Music Theory and Aural Skills at
Prior to moving to Midland I served for two years as 4th Horn of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra in Little Rock, and before that I had the great fortune to live from 2004-2007 in Honolulu where I was a Graduate Assistant in Composition, a substitute hornist with the Honolulu Symphony, pianist for the Honolulu Waldorf Schools Eurythmy classes and choir accompanist of the First Unitarian-Universalist Church of Honolulu. Though I did not grow up in a UU church, it was in this last role that I fully realized how much I identified with and appreciated the UU tenets and world views, so I am very glad to have found this congregation and to be actively participating in the musical life of the UU church again.
Prior to living in Hawaii, I spent six years in Bloomington, Indiana as a horn performance major at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. I graduated high school from Interlochen Arts Academy (near Traverse City, Michigan) and grew up in Detroit, where I enjoyed my dad’s impromptu piano playing from my earliest ages and followed.
Sonja Kassal
I grew up in Connecticut and during my middle school years I fell in love with orchestral music, the French horn, and singing. While active as both a hornist and singer through high school, I switched my focus entirely to horn when I began my undergraduate studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
From there I moved on to a masters in horn performance at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. After completing that degree I spent several years teaching horn at Millikin University in Decatur, IL and maintaining a busy free-lance career, performing with the Millikin-Decatur, Champaign-Urbana, Arkansas, and Illinois
Symphonies, the Prairie Ensemble, Opera in the Ozarks, and others. In the fall of 2011 I moved to the Midland area in order to be with Scott. I needed something to do musically when I got here, so I joined the Midland-Odessa Symphony Chorale, which greatly rekindled my interest in singing. In addition to the chorale, I now enjoy studying voice with Janice Archer and singing in the professional ensemble Musica Sacra. In the spring of 2011 I was thrilled to accept a position as Co-Principal Horn of the Midland-Odessa Symphony and am now in my second season with the MOSC, which includes being a member of our woodwind quintet, the West Texas Winds. I am excited for the opportunity to share my love of music in new ways as a music director for this congregation.