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ChoralBlogAll views expressed are those of the author only
Living and working in the Far Northern Highlands of Scotland for the past forty years, I have come to the realization that my work has an identity with nature, a belonging with nature, whether in a small garden or in a vast landscape or just between plants in a window box. My creative process involves a close, continuing and intense relationship with the landscape and wilderness of the Scottish Highlands, a part of which is long hikes into the mountains, bringing back materials such as rocks and sediments to incorporate into my work.
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Feral Choir leader taps the wilder side of vocal music. It’s true that vocal ensembles are inherently social organizations; savagery is one quality that’s usually missing from their makeup. But Minton’s aim is to usher the wild and the uncanny into the realm of vocal musicGotta love the phrase "Feral choir".
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It is sad to note the passing of opera composer Menotti, who died yesterday.
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My Chamber Choir is working on Som stjärnorna på himmelen by Wilhelm Peterson-Berger. It is a fabulous piece of music that I’ve loved for many years. I first heard the work at an ACDA Convention by the Mats Nilssons Vokalensemble and I’ve wanted to do it ever since.
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This article points to new brain research which suggests that our brains are more wired towards improvisation than perfection. This summary/abtract of a longer study:
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Betsy Grizzell writes on Chicago Classical Music about the "glass curtain" between the performers and audience. Perfect Concerts. You know, the ones where the performers all dress the same, walk the same, look the same. Very Stepford. Very calculated. Someone obviously ordered up a glass curtain to make sure the audience is kept separate from the performance.There's a roaring debate going on in ChoralTalk right now about technical perfection vs expression, but this essay sums it up pretty well. There's no question that they work enormously hard at the various technical aspects of their music (if you've never sung vocal jazz, take my word for it that it's very difficult), but they aren't working on expression per se, rather just connecting with an audience. As a conductor, I always feel in touch with the audience, even though I have my back to them. I know whether they're listening or reacting or bored without having to see them; it's something in the little rustles and the coughs and the creaking of seats as people cross and uncross their legs. It's in the pause in between the end of a piece and the beginning of the applause. Although Betsy is in an unconducted group where she can make eye contact with the audience at all times, there's no reason our singers can't be aware of the audience without looking at them, just as we conductors are. And even without eye contact, we can be singing to them, rather than to ourselves. But it takes, for some singers, a pretty major change in viewpoint.
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Jonathan Miller, on Chicago Classical Music: First and foremost: sing squarely in the middle of the pitch. Most bass notes work well with this rule, partly because most bass notes (at least in the stuff I sing) are the "roots" of their chords. Everyone lines up on top of your note. It's quite fun.After spending a couple of semesters studying tunings and temperaments in grad school, I still find this one of the great mysteries of choral music. We all bring the third of the chord higher in major triads because it seems more "in tune" than equal temperament, and yet a perfectly-tuned third (a 5:4 ratio) is actually smaller than an equal-tempered third, by a good fourteen cents (where a half-step is 100 cents). A Pythagorean third, created by ascending four perfectly-tuned fifths and descending two octaves, is a 81:64 ratio, a bit larger than an equal-tempered third, but it strains credulity that our ears can hear a frequency ratio like that. Gerald Eskelin, director of the LA Jazz Choir, wrote in his fascinating book Lies My Music Teacher Told Me that thirds standing alone want to be tuned lower (i.e. to the 5:4 ratio) but thirds in a chord containing a fifth want to be higher. Just one of those eternal mysteries, I guess.
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Jocelyn Lavin of the Hallé Choir blog has some tips on sight-reading. Instant summary:
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Part of a fascinating new photo archive at the library of Congress:
Pie Town, New Mexico There are thousands of color photographs from 1939-1945, and public domain, at least in the USA. Worthy of hours of browsing.
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Here's the best summary I've seen so far:
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A milestone for me: I performed in my very first voice recital yesterday. I know this is old hat to many choir directors, but I've never really learned to sing properly, despite a couple semesters' worth of lessons in grad school at Westminster Choir College. But I have found myself teaching others to sing on a regular basis as a choir director (there's a lot of group vocal instruction in choir directing, as we all know), so when I had a chance, I decided to find out how to do it myself, so I could be a more effective instructor. I'll probably never be an opera star, but singing a recital along with seven or eight other adult students was an achievement for me. Who says old dogs can't learn new tricks?
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This has always bugged me. Why do so many choirs pronounce "savior" as "save your"? No one says it that way, do they? I have the same question about "evil", pronounced "e-ville", but that doesn't come up as often.
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Tyler Skidmore writes: Thought this article is interesting. You might want to throw this out into your Choralnet blog. Is American Idol destroying much of what we have done as music educators to encourage our students?
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God forbid I should ever get a review like this: an object lesson in how an ineffective conductor can drag down a performance.The conductor's sloppy and incommunicative technique (and stunning lack of energy) resulted in performances which were shapeless, bleached out, at times a real train wreck. The orchestra was rudderless, so much so that a number of its ace principal players missed entrance after entrance, clearly because Silverstein's cues were so unhelpful. There was no way to read his baton, to see and feel where the beat lay, so they guessed and guessed wrong.The reviewer thought the piece, a newly-composed violin concerto, could have been very listenable with a good performance. But this was a performance of exceptional disarray. Clunky cellos. Galumphing, vaguely in-tune horns. Messy tutti chords. Pretty much everything out of sync. The second movement, intended to evoke a blissful stasis, practically ground to a halt.The work was followed by a Dvorak symphony, which didn't go much better: "blown entrances", "sloppy climaxes", "out-of-tune playing". This is a professional symphony, even if it's not a top-rated one. But [he] was failing to perform the most basic function of a conductor, to guide his musicians.I told my wife that if I ever got a review like that, I'm definitely changing careers.
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http://ancientfaithradio.com
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From the TLC website: "The chorus is racing to prepare for their first performance, but first they have to decide what to wear. Tony, Tim, and Duckie get solos in Jerome's new song. On the big day, Johnathan almost derails their triumph." [posted by David T.]
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When I was in graduate school, I often heard rumors of churches whose music directors subjected them to a "music appreciation Sunday," on which all music was eliminated: hymns were just recited, no organ, no choir, no sung liturgy. The idea was that the congregation would thereafter no longer take music for granted. I've never gotten a firsthand account of a church which actually did this, and it seems like a terribly manipulative idea for a music director to propose, but the fantasy is appealing.
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The new hymnal for the ELCA, the main Lutheran denomination in the USA, has a new version of the familiar Advent hymn "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." "O come, blest Dayspring, come and cheerInstead, it's now "O Dayspring, come with light and cheer;I don't mind losing the archaic "blest" and "thine", but it's a bummer to lose the word "advent," which is rare enough. I fear they think it's too obscure a word for the limited-English vocabulary they're using to strive for accessibility, but you'd think this would be a case where they'd want to preserve the meaning of the word, so that "Advent" doesn't become a meaningless word like "Lent" (i.e. only meaningful in a church context). I suppose I should just be glad they kept "dayspring" rather than translating "oriens" literally as "morning star" or some such. My church choir did the Kodaly arrangement of "Veni Emanuel" for Lessons & Carols this year. A very worthwhile arrangement, and pretty easy (it's only SAB).
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According to the TLC website, tonight's episode (21 December) is titled "Still I Rise." Here's a link to the schedule page at the TLC website. However, when I checked my local listings, and those for some other locations, I couldn't find mention of this episode being shown. According to the local listings, the fifth episode might be shown on the 24th, and then repeated on the 28th. If you manage to watch tonight's episode, post your comments in this topic. [posted by David T.]
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...passed away yesterday at the age of 83. He had a very consistent and comprehensible approach to harmony, and a deft way with text setting, but his music never caught on, in my opinion because much of it is just too difficult. Much as I'd like to do "A Curse, A Lament, and A Vision" or "Fanfares", it would take too much rehearsal time in proportion to its audience appeal. While a few choral composers (such as Poulenc) can be difficult and still have enough box-office draw to be worth it, Pinkham never quite reached that level.
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"Sanctuary"
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATXV3DzKv68
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Anything different?
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I won't be seeing this, having no television, but feel free to comment on the TV show Trial by choir, premiering Nov. 26 on TLC.
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In England, they treat the value of parents singing to their children seriously. Maybe too seriously? Parents could be forced to go to special classes to learn to sing their children nursery rhymes, a minister said.The ministry has developed a national curriculum for babies. The threat of action against parents who fail to sing nursery rhymes was unveiled by Mrs Hughes as she gave the first details of Mr Blair's 'national parenting academy', a body that will train teachers, psychologists and social workers to intervene in the lives of families and become the 'parenting workforce'. |
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