“What really made Goucher feel right was that it came after me,” says Dr. Roy Belfield. Dr. Belfield joined Goucher this fall as an Associate Professor of Music and the director of choir and orchestra on campus.
“It’s good to be back. There’s no place like a college campus,” Dr. Belfield said on coming back to teaching. While he most recently worked as the director of music at Towson United Methodist Church, Dr. Belfield previously spent 13 years teaching at Stillman College, Winston-Salem State, UMD Eastern Shore, and Texas Southern University.
Speaking about his goals at Goucher, Dr. Belfield said he hopes to see the return of the music major. “I would love to see that come back because that’s just a big part, I think, of a liberal arts school.” Goucher hasn’t offered a major in music since 2018, when it was one of several programs removed from Goucher’s catalog as part of the college’s “Program Prioritization” cost cutting measures.
Dr. Belfield also hopes to see more students join Goucher’s choir and orchestra, encouraging students to invite their friends to concerts and even to sit-in on rehearsals. “We need to find creative ways to bring students into the music area.” Additionally, he hopes to get Goucher’s music ensembles more involved in the local community off campus, and mentioned the possibility of having them perform for local high schools.
Dr. Kendall Kennison, who serves as the chair of the music department, said he is “thrilled to welcome a colleague with Dr. Belfield’s extensive and varied experience teaching and directing student choirs at this time of growth and change in our program. But all that would be worthless without his patient, thoughtful personality and evident joy in working with students. He’ll also be able to contribute to other programs at the college via his scholarship on the history of African-American music, and I hope for him to be an important part of Goucher’s community for years to come.”
Dr. Belfield didn’t originally expect to end up as a teacher though. He earned his DMA in organ performance, and never intended to go into education until he spent time working with elementary schoolers as a student-teacher. “My student teaching experience was so positive that I totally changed my path and I decided I want to teach little children [music].” He says that now “teaching is just a part of who I am, you know?”
Dr. Belfield didn’t initially expect to return to teaching either. Dr. Belfield met Goucher’s previous director of choir and orchestra, Micahel Semancik, as the accompanist for Deer Creek Chorale, where Semancik was a singer. When Semancik made the decision to leave Goucher, he told Dr. Belfield would be a great fit. “I didn’t have much creative freedom in my most recent position at the church, and after hearing that Michael Semancik was thinking about leaving, he told me it would just be the opposite here,” Dr. Belfield said. “The way it happened made me aware that, okay, there’s a bigger plan that I don’t know about… there was, I think, a force pulling me back into teaching, probably where I should have been all along.”
Dr. Belfield currently teaches choir, orchestra, and basic piano. He will also be teaching sight singing in the Spring.
By Zev Israel, ’26
