Photo by Erin Nelson.
Taylor Striklin, the new choir director at Vestavia Hills High School, takes the Voces class through warmups.
Taylor Stricklin got into teaching hoping to one day land at a place like Vestavia Hills High School.
“This is what I envisioned,” said Stricklin, the new choir director at the high school.
While Stricklin has enjoyed all of the stops in his career so far, he said he feels “incredibly blessed” to be at Vestavia. While the expectations are high, he said he enjoys a lot of community support as he takes over for longtime director Megan Rudolph, who retired after last year.
Stricklin is a Hoover native and was in choir all of his life. He first started teaching in Enterprise before earning his master’s degree in choral conducting from LSU. He served as a graduate assistant at Vestavia Hills High School last year under Rudolph before taking over the program this year.
“It’s obviously big shoes to fill,” Stricklin said, adding that Rudolph built a “reputable program.”
Stricklin pursued music not just because of his natural talent in the field, but also because of the love he has for the community and the positive influences that impacted him as a student, including Ken Berg with the Birmingham Boys Choir and John Kincaid at Simmons Middle School. The lessons he learned from those people are things he tries to instill in his students today — creating a place for each one of them and making sure they feel welcome and are ready to learn, he said.
Choir creates a place for students to interact with peers with whom they may not otherwise interact, Stricklin said.
“It’s a great image of what society could be,” he said.
Stricklin oversees four non-audition choirs, along with Honors choir, Vestavia Hills Singers, an ensemble and Just Singin’. Each one is a little different, but Stricklin said each class, regardless of talent or whether they auditioned, gets his full attention, and they all have a chance to be excellent.
All choral groups at the high school have a “tradition of excellence,” and he is still feeling his way through each one, he said. The success each group has had in recent years is a testimony to the program Rudolph built, Stricklin said.
Stricklin said he believes in using relationships to motivate his students.
“I think it’s really important to talk to them as people, young adults … as opposed to talking down to them,” Stricklin said.
Relationships can be used to get everyone on the same page and pushing toward the same goal, he said. He has the benefit of being in a system where music education is a priority, even before students reach the high school. He praised the work of music education teachers throughout the elementary and middle school levels and said he is able to do things with freshman students at Vestavia he was not able to do with older high school students elsewhere.
Stricklin said there is a lot of buy-in throughout the Vestavia Hills community for the arts, which helps him feel supported.
While not all of his roughly 230 students will go on to pursue a career in music, Stricklin said the skills they learn will help them in whatever field they choose, and will hopefully encourage them to be a lifelong musician and patron of the arts.
