About

Mora Wolff is a thoughtful, passionate organist and an emerging Gregorian chant scholar with extensive experience as a church musician. Originally from the rural cornfields of Illinois, she earned a BM in Flute Performance from the University of Illinois (2017) and her formative musical experiences at the Illinois Newman Center led her to pursue sacred music with full ardor after graduation. Having little piano technique, she began learning the organ at twenty-two. Seven years later, she has grown to become a formidable organist, studying sacred music and working as a church musician throughout the United States and in Europe. She earned a Sacred Music Certificate from the St. Gregory Institute for Sacred Music in Pittsburgh, studying under Nicholas Will, Dr. Stahurski, and Dr. Ann Loubonsky. She then served as organ scholar at St. Maria Goretti Catholic Church in Madison, Wisconsin and as Interim Music Director at St. Patrick’s in Urbana, Illinois. She is currently pursuing a MM in Organ Performance under Dr. Olsen at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), where has performed in masterclasses for Amanda Mole, Dr. Anne Laver and Dr. Russel Stinson and in studio recitals around the North Carolina Triad area.  She most recently performed on the February 2025 Flentrop Organ Series at Salem College, North Carolina and plays for the 8:30am service at Wesley Memorial Methodist Church in High Point, North Carolina. She is equally an avid proponent of Gregorian semiology. Her website, mora-vocis.com, is dedicated to the dissemination of Gregorian semiology in America. She has studied Gregorian semiology in the United States under Fr. Anthony Ruff and Fr. Stephen Concordia and in Italy under Dr. Franz Prassl. As an educator-performer, she has successfully taught Gregorian semiology to amateurs and semi-professionals alike. Fr. Ruff has praised her interpretation, saying, “I would really love to hear singing like this in the liturgy, as a solo or from a group you would conduct.” She savors any opportunity to sing early music, especially Renaissance polyphony and most recently sang the chorales from Bach’s St. John Passion at Duke Chapel (April 2024). In her spare time, she loves long walks, deep conversation, and hanging out with her two favorite men, her husband and son. 

mora-vocis is a deliberate play on words. In the Vatican edition, the mora (morae) vocis is a white space the size of puctum between a melisma and the neumes that follow it. It literally means “the delay of the voice”. Although it is not based on paleographic research, it is related to Gregorian chant and does have my name in it…