On Halloween afternoon, the George and Sharon Mabry Concert Hall will hold a sound that has been building all day: dozens of flutes, from middle-school beginners to college players to adults who simply never stopped, playing together on one stage. The Austin Peay State University Department of Music presents the Flute Choir Day Concert at 2 p.m. on Saturday, October 31, 2026, in the 600-seat hall on the APSU campus. Admission is free and open to the public, and listeners are encouraged to dress in seasonal attire.
The concert is the finale of a full day of playing. Check-in opens at 9 a.m. in the Music/Mass Communication Building lobby, followed by a warm-up session at 9:30 led by Dr. Beomjae Kim, APSU's professor of flute. The choir reading and rehearsal begin at 10, lunch is provided for registered participants at 12:30, and a sound check at 1:45 precedes the public performance. The event is designed for middle school and high school flutists, college players, and what the university calls flute enthusiasts of all ages, who rehearse and perform side by side rather than as separate tiers. Registration, which includes music, instruction, and lunch, is $15 for community and visiting flutists and free for APSU students.
The rehearsal and performance are led by Beth Davis, director of the Nashville Flute Choir. Davis is a professional flutist and music educator in Middle Tennessee who also serves as personnel manager for the Nashville Praise Symphony and as a school band director; she sits on the board of the Flute Society of Greater Nashville. The Nashville Flute Choir itself is an auditioned, nonprofit ensemble for players in the Nashville area who love flutes and flute music, and Davis's role in Clarksville is a short trip up I-24 from her home base.
Kim, who handles the day's warm-up, brings a résumé that would be unusual for a regional university anywhere, let alone one in Montgomery County. A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and the Manhattan School of Music, where he earned both a master's degree and a doctorate along with the school's Artist Diploma, he has been praised by The New York Times for his "memorable eloquence" and has performed at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, Weill Recital Hall, and Stern Auditorium, at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, and at the Kennedy Center, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Seoul Arts Center. He was a winner of the 2017 Astral Artists National Auditions and is an alumnus of Ensemble Connect, the Carnegie Hall–Juilliard partnership program. He is a member of The New York Pops and principal flute of the American Composers Orchestra, and has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, the Nashville Symphony, and the Korean National Symphony Orchestra. Before coming to Clarksville he taught at Ocean County College in Toms River, New Jersey.
The hall hosting the concert carries a history of its own. The Mabry Concert Hall is the centerpiece of the Music/Mass Communication Building and has been ranked among the nation's top ten music venues by The Robb Report, praised for its acoustics and equipped with a ticket office, green room, retractable orchestra pit, and a fully customizable stage. Its name honors two people whose tenure at Austin Peay spans more than half a century. George Mabry arrived in 1970 as director of choral activities; that November, the department's voice professor, Jack Hurt, died suddenly, and department chair Thomas Cowen called George's wife, Sharon, who had double-majored in piano and voice in college. She started the following Monday, expecting a temporary assignment. She stayed 52 years, becoming the longest-serving employee in university history, mentoring thousands of students, and earning the university's first Richard M. Hawkins Award in 1979 and its Distinguished Professor Award in 2003. When she retired in 2022, the hall already bore both their names. As colleague Jeffrey Williams put it at the time, "as soon as you say Austin Peay, you think of the Mabrys in the same breath."
The concert is presented with support from the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts, known on campus as CECA and pronounced "seek-ah." Founded in 1985, CECA brings as many as 85 guest artists to Clarksville each year and presents up to 100 public arts and culture events annually across art and design, creative writing, music, and theatre and dance, while funding faculty research and student scholarships. The Department of Music it supports is a busy operation in its own right, hosting more than 100 performances each semester across the Mabry hall, the 80-seat Recital Hall in the Art + Design Building, Heydel Hall, and other venues on campus and around town.
For anyone who wants to play rather than listen, registration is still the route in: participants sign up through the APSU music department's Flute Choir Day page, and questions go to Dr. Kim at [email protected]. Those who simply want to hear the result can walk in at 2 p.m. on October 31. There is no reserved seating and no ticket to buy. What they will hear is the product of a single day's work by a choir that met that morning, led by a Nashville conductor and warmed up by a flutist who has played Carnegie Hall, in a hall named for the couple who built the department around them. Seasonal attire, the university notes, is encouraged.