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2O2 4 – 2O2 5 GU I D E to Y E L LOW S P R I NG S 41 music that gets us together, but then within that, what we sing is part of how we build community, too.” A longtime music scholar and activist, Roma herself, and her history, are a kind of yard- stick by which to consider the World House Choir’s years. Growing up as part of an Ital- ian Catholic family in Phila - delphia, Pennsylvania, Roma began her musical journey at age 4, when she started taking piano lessons. Her older sister, she said, was originally the piano student, albeit reluc- tantly — but Roma felt herself drawn to the instrument. “[My sister] felt tortured playing the piano, but I would get up there and try and play her stuff,” Roma said. “And so the [piano] teacher said, ‘I've never taken somebody so young,’ but took me. And I was very lucky — really, really lucky. I fell in love with the piano.” Roma attended kindergar - ten through 12th grade in the 1950s and ’60s at Germantown Friends School — an educa- tional experience that she said put her at odds with what had otherwise been a conservative upbringing at home and, ulti - mately, became a major influ - ence on the shape of her life. “I was exposed to Quaker Meeting and people getting up and talking about the war in Vietnam and pacifism,” Roma said. “What was happening for me at the school was different from my family, and so I became a convinced Friend [Quaker] when I was 17. … The social justice [focus] started there.” Roma went on to study music at the University of Wis- consin for both her undergrad- uate and graduate careers. Ser- endipitously, she was a student during the nascence and rise of the women’s choral move- ment, and her intersection with that movement, she said, led to what would become a decades-long vocation. “[At the University of Wisconsin,] I was beginning to deal with my being a lesbian and a feminist,” Roma said. “I had been [studying] piano [and was] practicing all by myself in this practice room, and I said, ‘This is not me. I'm a people person.’” Roma was presented with the opportunity to participate in a two-week conducting workshop. The workshop, she said, opened up new vistas of possibility for her — and changed the direction of her course of study. She went on to earn her master’s degree in choral music at Wisconsin. The years that followed that directional shift are dotted by markers of women’s musical history laid down by Roma and her contemporaries: In the early ’70s, she worked with historian Ann Gordon to iden- tify centuries of music written by and about women, which culminated in the creation of the folk opera “American Women: A Choral History.” In 1975, Roma founded the Anna Crusis women’s choir — the first feminist women’s choir in the nation. That choir — which is still performing nearly 50 years later — performed “American Women: A Choral History” at colleges and uni - versities in the northeastern United States. “I wanted to empower women’s voices and women singing together,” Roma said. “Where else are our experi- ences being sung about?” Roma left Anna Crusis after eight years to pursue her Doctor of Music Arts degree in Cincinnati in 1983. The same year, she founded the now-40-year-old women’s choir MUSE in Cincinnati, where, after several years, she met her now-partner, Dorothy ▲ On Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2024, local singer Phillip O’Rourke performed “Something Inside So Strong” backed by Cathy Roma's World House Choir. P H O T O : M A T T M I N D E Smith. Roma said she had begun making friends and pro- fessional connections in Yellow Springs, where Smith lived while a member of MUSE. “I stole Dorothy from Yellow Springs,” she said with a grin. “She lived up here and I lived down there, and we lived separately for five years. Then she said, ‘We can get a house down in Cincinnati — I'll move and I'll give you five years [before we move back].’ And she gave me 19.” During the tail end of what was ultimately almost three decades in Cincin- nati, and after she and Smith moved to Yellow Springs in 2012, Roma’s choral work expanded beyond women’s choirs. Through her work as an educator at Wilmington College, Roma was able to connect with incarcerated men in the Warren Correctional Facility in Lebanon, Ohio, to form Umoja Men’s Chorus — WWW.VILLAGEAUTOMOTIVE SERVICE.NET 1455XeniaAve. | 937-767-2088 All Service, Maintenance and Repair on Foreign and Domestic Cars V illage Automotive S E R V I C E E V O L V E D . 232 Xenia Ave. YSO • 937-767-2091 www.Epic-Bookshop.com New & used books on most subjects est. 1974 Open weekdays 12-6 Sat. 10-6 Sun. 12-4 CLOSED WED . Specializing in the Spiritual, the Mystical & the Meditative