PHOTOGRAPH BY | Myra Klarman

When Eugene Rogers was studying vocal performance at the University of Illinois, he won a conducting competition judged by longtime Macalester professor and choral music icon Dale Warland.

At that point, realizing he had a gift for conducting, Rogers switched his major, eventually earning a doctor of musical arts degree from the University of Michigan.

As he began to interview for faculty positions, it was that Dale Warland connection that first piqued Rogers’s interest in Macalester. But when he boned up on the college for his interview, he says, “I knew that here I would be working with brilliant students and challenged by my colleagues.” The college’s long-standing commitment to multiculturalism and diversity was also perfect for Rogers, who’d been named “Most Influential Educator” for founding and directing a multicultural high school chorus in suburban Chicago in the ’90s. And when he walked across campus last spring, says Rogers, “I fell in love with the place.”

As Mac’s new director of choral activities, Rogers conducts the Macalester Concert Choir, the Singing Scotsmen (men), and the Hildegard Singers (women), many of the members of which are neither music majors nor minors. Rogers has been guest conductor and lecturer at festivals as far away as Singapore, Portugal, and Italy. He serves as bass section leader of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Chorale, conducted by none other than Warland. And he’s just getting warmed up.

“I was put on this earth to teach young people and to make music,” says Rogers. Coming from a passionate artist and a man of faith, this is no sound bite. Rogers grew up singing gospel with his church choir but didn’t learn to read music until ninth grade when he took up the piano and began teaching and conducting.

He puts those conducting chops to the test this spring with two major performances: the inaugural “Songs of the Earth” concert, an eclectic mass featuring music from Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Egypt, and the American gospel tradition, and the War and Peace concert, featuring Mozart’s Requiem and A Procession Winding Around Me by Jeffrey Van ’63 The latter unites the various student choirs with the Macalester Festival Chorale, a 35-voice group of faculty, staff, and alumni singers that Rogers brought back as an annual opportunity for adult vocalists to connect with Macalester. “Songs of the Earth,” which brought together the college’s Concert Choir and African Music Ensemble, kicked off rehearsals with a three-day retreat about the history and culture of the works. As his friends have observed to Rogers, “You don’t do anything simple.”

This ambitious first year at Mac might give the wrong impression of Rogers, a warm and unpretentious man who loves fiction and biography, walking along the Mississippi, and all kinds of music. (The last three CDs he bought were folk and rock, contemporary gospel, and hip-hop.) Rogers’s hope for the choral department is that people know “whatever your background, there’s a place here for you.” And his top non-musical goal? “To try every highly recommended ethnic restaurant in the Twin Cities!”