Joseph Kemper
Dr. Joseph Kemper is a conductor, educator, and composer dedicated to nurturing the next generation of choral artists, servant-leaders, and lifelong musicians who use their gifts for meaningful societal impact. His work spans collegiate, secondary, community, youth, church, prison-outreach, and neurodiverse ensembles across the country.
He is currently Assistant Professor of Music at St. Olaf College, where he conducts the Chapel Choir and Viking Chorus, teaches Choral Conducting, Choral Literature, and Music and Social Justice, directs the Summer Music Academy Choir, and serves on the artistic committee for the St. Olaf Christmas Festival. In addition, he leads the Cantanti Singers and Treble Singers with Angelica Cantanti Youth Choirs.
From 2023–2025, Kemper was Assistant Professor of Music at Concordia College in Moorhead, where he was nominated for the 2025 Flaat Distinguished Teaching Award and collaborated on the Concordia Christmas Concert. Previous appointments include faculty roles at Whitman College and Winter Park High School, where his advanced treble ensemble was selected to perform at the 2014 Florida ACDA Conference.
An active clinician, Kemper has conducted honor choirs, led workshops, and presented across the country. Recent engagements include the 2024 Florida ACDA High School Honor Choir, the 2022 Montana State University Fall Symposium, and the 2019 Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp Honor Choir.
A passionate advocate for music’s role in social transformation, Kemper curates programs that engage with urgent societal themes and often involve partnerships with nonprofit organizations. His concerts have explored topics such as environmental justice, refugee support, school gun violence, and incarceration. He is especially drawn to music that cultivates empathy and understanding across lines of time, belief, and culture—viewing the concert space as a site for transformation.
As a champion of new and diverse choral music, Kemper has led premieres of works by composers including Mari Esabel Valverde, Evelyn Simpson Curenton, Arianne Abela, Stanford Scriven, and Ronja Mokráňová. Recent major works under his direction include Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands, Ulysses Kay’s Choral Triptych, Robert Ray’s Gospel Mass, Eriks Ešenvalds’ Passion and Resurrection, Benjamin Britten’s Cantata Misericordium, and historical works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Gabriel Fauré, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Giacomo Carissimi, and Marianna von Martines.
Kemper’s scholarship focuses on respectful cross-cultural engagement, performance practice of African-American spirituals, social-issue-centered programming, and student-centered pedagogy. He has presented at Minnesota ACDA, the Michigan Music Conference, and the Society for Music Teacher Education National Conference, and his work has been featured in the Choral Journal.
His commitment to prison arts outreach spans work in correctional facilities across Michigan, Washington, and Minnesota. At Concordia, he created and led “Singing, Incarceration, and Restorative Justice,” a course serving incarcerated residents at Clay County Jail. The program received the 2025 Dave Grant Program of the Year award from Minnesota Jail Programs and Services.
As a composer, Kemper’s original works – including settings of texts by incarcerated poets – have been performed nationwide. Several of his arrangements were featured in the 2024 Concordia Christmas Concert, “Our Eyes, At Last, Shall See Him.”
He holds degrees from the University of Michigan (D.M.A.), Yale University (M.M.), where he received the inaugural Robert Shaw Prize, and St. Olaf College (B.M., with departmental distinction).
He lives in Northfield, Minnesota, with his wife and two daughters, and enjoys baking bread, running, Nordic skiing, swimming, biking, reading, and solving crosswords.