What does Mack Wilberg say to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?

Jeffery Carter lets us in on some of the rehearsal feedback Mack Wilberg gives the famed Mormon Tabernacle Choir:

“The have to see your faces! Fifty percent of your communication is in your face.”

 

When the choir wasn’t getting a passage: “You gotta take it home and work on it.”

 

About the word ‘square’ in Seventy-Six Trombones: “High smile vowel! You’re drooping! It must be on the cheekbones.” And then he kept coming back to this idea of high smiley vowels.

 

While working on the opening phrase of a choral setting of the Pledge of Allegiance: “That vowel is the first thing they hear, and the vowel isn’t unified. Brighter please.” 

 

He spoke of “upper shelf vowels,” meaning bright and high in the face. And then in the passage ‘many are the stars of heaven,’ he had the choir cross out every R! Even a choir this fine and this well-trained has to cross out their R’s!!

 

“Sing better and better each time through.” “Sing smarter.” “We lose our pitch when we don’t keep the vowels bright.”