Stanislaus State is mourning the loss of Professor Emerita Ginger Covert Colla, who taught in the Department of Music for 13 years, mentored generations of Central Valley students and served as a significant figure in California’s choral music education community. Colla passed away on Dec. 9, of congestive heart failure.
In addition to conducting choirs, she taught music education courses and supervised student teachers until she retired in 1999. Those who knew her said music was foremost among her many creative talents.
“Ginger was an inspiration to the music community of the Central Valley,” said Department of Music Chair David Chapman. “She will be deeply missed.”
Stan State’s Coordinator of Choral and Vocal Activities Daniel R. Afonso Jr. lauded Colla as “one of a kind.”
“This is a great loss for the University and the Central Valley music community,” Afonso said. “In addition to being an award-winning choral conductor and educator, she was also a composer, singer, poet, children’s books author, and the list goes on.
“She remained a strong supporter of our choral program and served as a guest clinician for our high school choral festival for almost 20 years.”
A motivating talent in music education, Colla was named Outstanding Choral Music Educator by the California Music Educators Association in 1989. In 2004, she was awarded the Howard S. Swan Award from the California chapter of the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) in recognition of her career of excellence in the choral arts.
Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Colla spent the first twelve years of her life in the Midwest before her family moved to California. At a young age, she developed a fierce love of three things: music, physical education and writing.
In high school, she joined the school choir, which turned out to be a life-changing move that steered her toward her future career as a music educator, according to her husband Richard Colla.
“Her choir director at the time, Jane Skinner Hardester, was very charismatic and Ginger just fell head over heels in love with the whole dynamic of being involved in a choir program,” Richard said. “Jane was a master teacher who had a lot of experience. She became Ginger’s mentor and they remained friends until Jane passed away in the early 2000s.”
After she completed her undergraduate degree in music education at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Colla landed her first teaching job in 1960 at Havenscourt Junior High School in East Oakland, where she taught general music and chorus.
A year later, she achieved her long-held dream of teaching at the high school level when Modesto High School hired her as its choral music teacher. While there, the school’s choirs participated in numerous state and regional competitive music education conventions, including the Junior Bach Festival in Berkeley. They were also invited to perform in San Francisco with professional soloists and members of the San Francisco Symphony.
Later, Colla wanted to spend more time on music education and work with students who wanted to become teachers and eventually transitioned to teaching music education.
In 1970, Colla completed a Master of Arts in Choral Music at Occidental College, and that fall was appointed Director of Choral Activities at San Diego Mesa College, where she taught choral music, voice and humanities for 14 years. While at Mesa College, she met Richard, and they wed in October 1981.
She went on to earn a Doctor of Musical Arts in Choral Conducting from the University of Illinois. She served as Director of Vocal and Choral Studies for two years at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
In 1986, the couple returned to the Central Valley when Colla landed a position at Stan State where she remained until she retired from academia in 1999. But her passion for teaching and working with students continued.
She founded a Kindermusik studio at Trinity United Presbyterian Church in Modesto, where she taught music, movement and literature to infants through seven-year-olds in four levels.
She eventually moved the studio to her home and continued to teach Kindermusik until 2019, during which time she taught music appreciation at Modesto Junior College as a part-time instructor. Additionally, she also co-developed and team-taught the E.J. Gallo Center for the Arts Creation Station summer arts program for children.
“She was always very creative, and she believed that music was holistic,” said her husband, Richard. “She liked to incorporate music and movement, dance, drama and art. She liked all of those things to work together.
“She really valued the connections she made with students, and she loved to hear about them moving on and doing other things in life, whether it was in music or in some other walk of life,” Richard said. “Even after she retired, she’d go and have coffee with former students, or they kept in touch on Facebook.
Richard was also a vocal and choral musician, and the two worked together on musical projects throughout the years. Eventually, she transitioned to writing poetry and children's books.
“It kind of follows Ginger’s theme in life, which was a synergy between all of the arts,” Richard said.
She penned stories for her Kindermusik students and read them during storytime. She went on to turn one of the stories into a book titled, “The Christmas Elf.” During the pandemic, Colla began to write poetry on a regular basis. In 2021, she published, “A Poet’s Life: Memories, Moods and Reflections.” She continued to write until the last few days of her life.
Richard said she had written enough poetry to complete another book, which he hopes to have published.
Richard hopes to organize a celebration of life service in his wife’s honor in the near future. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that a donation be made in Colla’s memory to the American Heart Association.
“She possessed a wonderful love of teaching and she cared about students. In addition to giving them an education, she wanted them to know that she also cared about them as individuals,” Richard said. “There’s been a real outpouring of support, which I've really appreciated. That has made her passing a little easier to bear.”
