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You are here: Home / Others / How to be a choral accompanist

How to be a choral accompanist

November 25, 2010 by philip copeland Leave a Comment


A nice series of posts about how to accompany for choir – 
 
Here’s part one.
 
And here is part two.
 
And a sampling from the articles:
5. Learn to play all of the voice parts together. Pay special attention to key changes, meter changes, accidentals, and any places where dissonance results between two or more voices. (Open score will seldom occur in music for the TVCC, so I’m saving instruction for that ’til later. This post is for beginners playing choral parts written SATB on two staves.)
 
6. At the rehearsal, the conductor may ask for any combination of parts, so be prepared to play them in any combination, for instance, soprano + tenor, bass + alto, soprano + alto + tenor, etc. Look for voice pairing – places where the composer has created duets or trios against the other voices. You can be sure that you’ll be asked to play those together.

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Comments

  1. philip copeland says

    November 28, 2010 at 3:36 pm

    I thought it would be a great post for choral directors – especially if they pointed their high school student accompanists to it.
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  2. John Howell says

    November 27, 2010 at 7:58 pm

    Philip:  An interesting article (or blog, or whatever), but it should be noted that she is talking about accomanying a volunteer church choir.  (That’s what the enigmatic “TVCC” stands for.)
     
    Thus she doesn’t really get into the nitty gritty that along with all the practical stuff, a colaborative choral accomapnist must also be a heck of a good pianist, since a great many choral works that might NOT be suitable for a volunteer church choir call for very advanced technique.
     
    A nice artilce, though, for beginners who are in the audience she was writing for.
     
    John
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