Tram Sparks
Professor of Practice
- Program:Choral & Sacred Music; Conducting
Tram Sparks (she/her) is professor of practice at the USC Thornton School of Music and served as Choral & Sacred Music Department Chair from 2022-2025. Recent artistic highlights include conducting the USC Thornton Chamber Singers in a performance of Ellen Reid’s Oscillations: One Hundred Years and Forever at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2024 Noon to Midnight Festival. In February 2025, the USC Thornton Choral Artists and vocal soloists collaborated with the Thornton Symphony in a performance of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy at Walt Disney Concert Hall conducted by Carl St.Clair. In June 2023, Sparks conducted the festival chorus (including the Thornton Chamber Singers) and the New England Symphonic Ensemble in a performance of Faure’s Requiem at Carnegie Hall.
Prior to her work in Los Angeles, Sparks was associate professor and associate director of Choral Activities at Temple University Boyer College of Music & Dance, where she taught from 1999-2009. Sparks taught graduate and undergraduate courses in choral literature, conducting and aural theory, and conducted the Concert Choir, University Chorale, Women’s Chorus and University Singers over the course of her 10 years at Temple University. In addition to her appointment at Temple, she has served as visiting assistant professor of Music at Dordt University (Sioux Center, Iowa) and director of the Choral Program at St. Joseph’s University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).
A child refugee of the Vietnam War, Sparks’ early musical training was in Okinawa, Japan and subsequently, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pre-College Division where she studied piano, solfege, and eurythmics and sang in a children’s choir. Sparks earned the Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance and the Master of Music in Choral Conducting from Temple University. Her piano training with Harvey Wedeen and David L. Stone is in the pedagogical lineages of Adele Marcus, Isabelle Vengerova and Josef Lhevinne.
Sparks holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Choral Conducting from Yale University. At the Yale School of Music and working with conducting mentor Marguerite L. Brooks, she completed the interdisciplinary certificate program in Music, Worship and the Arts at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
In the community, Sparks has served on the Board of Directors of Tonality and as music director at churches and synagogues in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. She is a frequent choral clinician, adjudicator and guest conductor. Sparks’ research interests include conducting technique rooted in modern dance theory (specifically, Graham Technique® and Laban movement analysis) and cheironomy’s forms and functions in contemporaneous early communities of worship.
Professional experience
Honors, Awards & Competitions:
- Merit Award for Teaching and Creative Activity (Temple University)
- Presidential Summer Research Fellowship (Temple University)
- The French Award (Yale Institute of Sacred Music)
- The Richard De Long Prize (Yale Institute of Sacred Music)
- Edward Stanley Seder Scholar (Yale Institute of Sacred Music)
Academic degrees
- DMA, Yale University School of Music, 2003
- MMA, Yale University School of Music, 1998; MM, Temple University Boyer College of Music and Dance, 1995
- BM, Temple University Boyer College of Music and Dance, 1993