Maxine Thévenot

Award-winning Canadian American musician Maxine Thévenot is known for her skillful, musical playing, inventive concert programming, and passionate, informed conducting. She combines a profound commitment to her liturgical work as a cathedral musician with guest conducting, solo and collaborative organ recitals, and thrives on co-creating community experiences.

Her musical career has taken her throughout Great Britain and North America and to many major European venues in Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, and Switzerland. Maxine’s upcoming performance schedule includes solo recitals, collaborative projects, guest conducting, and clinician work, and can be best seen at www.maxinethevenot.com

First-prize winner of the 2000 Canada Bach National Organ Competition, Maxine has also broadcast for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, and Pipedreams. Dr. Thévenot has been a featured performer and lecturer at national and regional conventions of the American Guild of Organists and the Royal Canadian College of Organists. She serves as a competition jury member and examiner for the American Guild of Organists and has served two terms on the editorial board of the Association of Anglican Musicians. She has performed for dignitaries such as Kamala Harris during the vice president’s New Mexico state visit in October 2022. In March 2023, she organized and performed in a concert that included the New Mexican premiere of Diné composer Raven Chacon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Voiceless Mass.

Canon Dr. Maxine Thévenot serves as the Director of Cathedral Music & Organist at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John in Albuquerque, NM. She is also the Artistic Director of an extensive community outreach ministry, Friends of Cathedral Music, now entering its 34th anniversary season. Recognized for her excellence as a recording artist, Maxine has released 18 recordings on Raven CD.

“[The Cathedral Choirs] have been expertly trained in their art.
They phrase with fine unanimity, achieve lucid balances and savour the words, in whatever language propels the music’s messages.”
A Blaze of Song — Gramophone Magazine (2025)

A highly sought-after and regarded choral conductor, chorus master, and guest clinician, Dr. Maxine Thévenot is the Founding and Artistic Director of Polyphony: Voices of New Mexico, the state’s first professional resident vocal ensemble. She serves as a part-time member at the University of New Mexico, where she teaches pipe organ. She previously taught music theory and music history and, from 2006 – 2020, was Director of the UNM Women’s Chorus, Las Cantantes.

A published composer with Paraclete Press, she has had her compositions premiered at several Cambridge and Oxford colleges, parish churches, and cathedrals in the UK, and subsequently performed across the UK and North America.

A native of Saskatchewan, Canada, Maxine Thévenot received her Bachelor’s degree in music education from the University of Saskatchewan (with Distinction) and her Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from the Manhattan School of Music. She was twice awarded the Bronson Ragan Award at Manhattan School of Music for ‘outstanding ability in organ performance’. Maxine is an Associate of the Royal Canadian College of Organists and the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto, and was made an Honorary Fellow of the National College of Music, London, UK, in 2006 for her “services to music.”