About

Dr. Patti DeWitt is a name well-known among Texas choral directors. Beginning in 1991, she has composed many pieces through Southern Music Company for the Texas State UIL Choral Sightreading Contest.  She holds a Bachelor of Music Education from Henderson State University and a Master of Music degree from East Texas State University (now Texas A&M at Commerce).  She earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from University of Houston in 1998.  Her dissertation is a comprehensive and sequential sightsinging program for the public school classroom.

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She has nineteen years of teaching experience in the public schools, where her choirs consistently won first division awards.  She has presented workshops and clinics at many state conventions as well as for individual school districts.  It is Dr. DeWitt's philosophy that music reading is a fundamental and requisite skill for singers, and her purpose has been to give teachers of young choirs ample and appropriate materials to achieve this end.  Dr. DeWitt also serves as clinician and mentor to public school teachers.

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Dr. DeWitt has authored classroom textbooks and educational products for choir, music theory, and elementary music.  Her choral series, The Singing Musician, is a series of 12 books at four levels and has been adopted for use in choral classrooms in many states and school districts.  Her "Marvelous Music Carpet" provides the opportunity for students to actively experience musical concepts.

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In addition, Dr. DeWitt has composed many concert choral works.  She has composed commissioned pieces for individual choirs as well as for the Texas Music Educators Association Region XVII Junior High All-Region Choir.  Many of her choral pieces have been published by Southern Music and Hal Leonard Corporation.  The rest she self-publishes.

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Other works include Children's Mass (1998) with organ and hand bell accompaniment, sacred piano arrangements, cello solos, Kaleidoscope, an unaccompanied flute solo, and a dramatic solo-cantata, Children, completed in 1984.