Going to conventions are always refreshing for me. I learn, I hear, I get ideas-it's great. I just came back from the ACDA Western Division Conference and had a blast!
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There were some great memories made this week, and I gained a lot of advice/wisdom/introspection about this career and my game plan. Don't get me wrong, there were lots of "receptions" and "teacher therapies" too :) If I learned anything this conference it is: This line of work is grueling, hard and emotionally draining, but with supportive friends who believe in you and God's wisdom and guidance, it can be done (and with a little passion and understanding, it can be done well). I'm ready for the future.
I'm preparing a concert of all misattributed works for my next program, and it's been lots of fun. There are so many pieces to choose from! The BWV is full of bogus Bach works, and unscrupulous publishers in the 18th and 19th centuries claimed that all kinds of stuff was by Mozart, Pergolesi, etc., so it would sell better. Well-known fakes like "Mon coeur se recommande à vous" as well as PDQ Bach are in the program too. I got the inspiration last year after we sang a not-really-by-Buxtehude Magnificat, which we always referred to as the "pseudo-Buxtehude."
It's been amazingly liberating to work on this music. A bass raises his hand and asks if that note should be a G-sharp rather than a G. Or the sopranos find the text underlay awkward and wonder if they can adjust it. The current orthodoxy is to treat composers as gods, so all questions like that always come down to determining the composer's intent. What would Mozart have wanted? we ask, ignoring the question of what Mozart's (or our) audience would want. The composer's score is treated as holy writ, and any deviation treated as blasphemy.
With this bogus music, the will of the composer can be freely ignored. Who cares what Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin (the composer of "Mon coeur") wanted? He's not even a demi-god. Who knows what loser wrote Bach's supposed St. Luke Passion? Whoever he was, he's a pretender to divinity. At last, I can make decisions based on what will make the most sense to the audience, without worrying about the high priests of Historically Informed Performance breathing down my neck.
I like to think I went into music because I had some musical sense and good musical instincts, and I trust my instincts when making musical decisions. It always galls me to have some hierarch of authenticity tell me I'm violating the basic spirit of music when I'm determining what's best for my audience. The cult of the composer is widespread in our era, and I think it's led to a generation of conductors and performers whose highest aspiration is to be technicians, not musicians.
This month the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, my choral alma mater, will present a concert that epitomizes the kind of music making that went on in Philadelphia when I was a student there in the 1980’s. The occasion is the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Joseph Castaldo’s extraordinary work for narrator, chorus and orchestra Ancient Liturgy, which was originally commissioned and premiered by the Music Group of Philadelphia under Seán Deibler, who also happened to be Choral Arts’ founding Artistic Director.
As previously mentioned here, Joseph Castaldo was my undergraduate composition teacher for four years. He and Seán Deibler were both tremendous personal and musical influences on me. As I also mentioned here in the past, Seán passed away last year, and this Choral Arts concert is being presented in his memory.
Composers often complain that choirs don't perform enough new works. Here's a choir dedicated to only doing new works by Connecticut composers. Composers pay a fee for a fixed amount of rehearsal time with paid singers. They make a recording and a public performance.
Maybe it's not the wave of the future, but it's an interesting idea for composers who want more exposure (and decent recordings of their works to submit to publishers).
We brainstomed ideas for the future for ChoralNet and ACDA - what might be possible - what might be dreamed - and how we might accomplish it.
I wondered - where would you like to see ChoralNet and ACDA head in the next few years? What is possible? What might you do with this space and our collaborative efforts as a community?
Gloria Y. Gadsden, an associate professor of sociology at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, was escorted off the campus on Wednesday because of jokes she had made on her Facebook page about wanting to kill students.
On Monday the professor posted this update: "Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ..." In another comment, on January 21, she wrote: "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman, it's been that kind of day."
But it may not be that simple:
However, Ms. Gadsden said she believes her suspension stems from a racial-harassment complaint she filed with the university last month and from an op-ed article she wrote for The Chronicle in 2008 about the challenges of being a black faculty member.
And a little later:
After her opinion piece was published in The Chronicle, she said she faced disapproval of it on the campus. She said her life was made difficult by administrators, and she encountered so much hostility from one colleague that she filed a racial-harassment complaint with the university last month.
Now I know this isn't about choral music, but it is about teaching and technology. We talk about that alot here!
A story in The Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye the other day about copyright. It discusses lessons from the history of book publishing, the evolution of copyright and what might happen in the future. It has some fascinating history - a few excerpts:
Nothing is sacred about intellectual property:
But he believes that today's information revolution may be even more disruptive than the one Gutenberg set off with his printing press. If we listen to those pirates of old, we'll learn that there is nothing sacred or natural about our basic ideas of intellectual property, he argues, characterizing those notions as imperfect conventions formed in and by the Industrial Revolution. In fact, he suggests, it may be time to cast our models of patents and copyright overboard.
Someone call the "Pirate King" was heavily involved in music publishing:
The pirate king's argument: The country was experiencing a piano boom at the time, so a lot more families needed sheet music. But the major publishers catered to clientele who could pay 18 pence per song, while Willetts charged just two pence. Because the rightful owners had no hope of selling to the new audiences at those prices, Willetts testified, he did no harm to their businesses with his efforts—while bringing high culture and educational benefits to all. "Indeed, piracy might even increase the sales of the legitimate publishers, since it amounted to free advertising," Johns writes, summarizing the pirate's logic.
A projection of where we go next:
"There's a deepening realization that the conceptual framework of intellectual property, which was defined in the Industrial Revolution, no longer fits with how we go around with our daily lives," he says. "The system of authorship that's existed in knowledge creation, in the sciences at least, seems to be in the process of being replaced by something that's much more like a system of flow than one of stasis."
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Composers often complain that choirs don't perform enough new works. 
