Westport Center for the Arts’ 2022-23 Noontime Concert Series continues on Friday, Dec.  9 with a free performance by Thomas R. Vozzella entitled Advent Organ Music. Vozzella is Director of Music-Organist at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Kansas City, and a staff organist at the Community of Christ World Headquarters in Independence, Missouri.

Vozzella has served as dean of the Black Hills Chapter of the American Guild of Organists (AGO) and National Repertoire and Resources Chair for Music in Worship of the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA).  His musical compositions are published by Alliance, Augsburg, Abingdon, Selah, CanticaNOVA, St. James Music Press, Sheet Music Plus and Music Notes. Vozzella has received five ASCAP Plus Awards.

As a presenter/performer, he has presented at state, regional and national ACDA and AGO conventions, toured in twenty-six states, the District of Columbia and eleven countries, most recently Germany. His choirs have sung for the Tennessee ACDA, the White House by invitation of President and Mrs. George W. Bush, the Harlem Globetrotters, and have received invitations from the Kansas MEA and Texas ACDA conferences.

Thomas holds degrees from the University of South Carolina, the University of Louisiana-Monroe, and Eastern Nazarene College with additional work was completed at the Royal School of Church Music-UK, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the Nazarene Theological Seminary, the Conductor’s Institute of South Carolina as well as in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Russia. Organ study has been with Lambert Brandes, Paul Hale, John Ditto, including masterclasses with Peter Hurford, Marie-Claire Alain, and John Obetz and organ improvisation with Baptiste-Florian Marle-Ouvard, Samuel Liégeon, Frédéric Blanc.