Joshua Palkki conducts at CSULB Festival
He sings. He wears argyle sweaters and mismatched socks. He admits to drinking too much coffee and wanting to be an archaeologist when he was young. Yet what’s most important to Joshua Palkki is making music, and not just run-of-the-mill notes and treble clefs.
Palkki’s passion is making beautiful music, the kind heard in the hallways at Cal State Long Beach. The kind of music that emanated from his own vocal cords as a youth, and those of the young voices he now conducts at the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music.
Palkki, an assistant professor of Vocal/Choral Music, was one of three conductors who worked with high school students at the recent Honors Festival, a three-day event that featured wind symphony, concert choir and string chamber music.
The students not only received instruction from CSULB professors, such as Palkki, but worked alongside current Conservatory students.
Palkki said teaching aspiring musicians is a labor of love. In his position at CSULB, he trains future choral teachers who have aspirations of teaching in the K-12 schools, a job he did for eight years before arriving at Long Beach.
“My real passion is in the K-12 classroom, and now I’m preparing people to go to the K-12 classroom to teach,” he said. “That’s where my life was, and so whenever I get a chance to work with middle or high school students I jump at the chance.
“Students at that age have so much potential and so much energy and I think it’s always a really exciting thing when you put a lot of adolescents in the same room that have the same love of music. It’s very, very special.”
It showed. Palkki coaxed those young voices who attended the Honors Festival to reach new levels with a mixture of humor, encouragement and a high-level of energy.
Palkki’s singing career began in his boyhood church in Ishpeming, Michigan, where his grandmother played the organ. One day, while rehearsing a song, she asked her grandson if he would be interested in singing the solo.
“I started then and never stopped,” he said, admitting he was scared to sing in front of the congregation. His grandmother’s presence helped him get over the butterflies.
“I knew that I was good at it,” he said. “I loved to sing and it was something that I had never really experienced before, and that’s really powerful coming from a place where the arts aren’t so much valued.”
Palkki joined the choir as a baritone, but his extra-curricular choice didn’t land him many friends in the iron mining town.
“If you weren’t a football or basketball player, you were nobody,” he said. That didn’t dissuade Palkki from belting out songs whenever he could. His singing eventually landed him at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in choral music.
From there, Palkki twice toured in Europe, came back and received his master’s in Choral Conducting and his doctorate in Music Education with an eye on teaching. He eventually landed his dream job in Long Beach.
