Jennifer has directed the Singapore Youth Choir (now the SYC Ensemble Singers) since 1986, winning accolades and re-defining the choral idiom together. Trained as a composer, her focus has been to create a library of new music for choirs. She brings music of the SYC and Singapore on her stints as guest conductor, to choirs and audiences in France, Japan and most recently, Taiwan. Last year, she conducted the New Liszt Ferenc Chamber Choir (Budapest) in a concert of SYC commissions and gifts.
Jennifer taught choral pedagogy and conducting at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, and has given workshops and short courses to conductors at home, in Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Taiwan. She has chaired and spoken on panels at conferences and symposia in Singapore, Argentina, Denmark, Estonia and Sweden; and was the principal lecturer at the 2008 Lithuanian Conductors Summer Academy. She presented lectures and reading sessions on Singapore choral music at symposia in Croatia, Poland and USA, and conducted the Asia Pacific Youth Choir in a programme of contemporary music of this region at the 10th World Symposium on Choral Music (Seoul, Korea, 2014).
Jennifer was Artistic Director of the Young Musicians’ Society, the arts company responsible for the Asia South Pacific Symposium on Choral Music (2001) and its offshoots, the First Aid for Choirs and Conductors Workshop Series, and the Kodaly Seminar Asia for music pedagogues, the latter in collaboration with the Kodály Institute of the Liszt Academy of Music (Budapest, Hungary).
For the International Federation for Choral Music, Jennifer co-coordinates the Asia Pacific Working Committee; and also serves on the World Choir Council, representing Singapore. She has been on jury at the World Choir Games since 2004, and at independent festivals in China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Poland and the USA.
In 2012, Jennifer was conferred the nation’s highest artistic accolade, the Cultural Medallion, by the Republic of Singapore.
