Joshua Bronfman

I am now entering my fourth year as a blogger here at choralnet. Hard to believe. I have really enjoyed contributing to the online discussion here over the past years. It's been fun, interesting, and well…hard. No doubt about it, blogging is hard. Much harder than I could ever have imagined. But, it's very fulfilling, and I've most definitely enjoyed […]

This is a new series (in addition to my forthcoming series on sacred music in public schools) on one of my favorite topics: recruiting.   When I was hired at my university job, I went to a friend of mine who is a high school choral director and asked him what I could do to […]

The last two posts (here and here) dealt with some of the problems that arise when we sing in choirs in public school settings. The problems happen all over, and are not new. I think I may have one way that we can help to make thing better. I believe that we need to start, before we […]

My last post was about an interaction I had with a parent regarding the use of sacred, Christian music on a "Winter Holiday" program. You can read all about it here. I alluded to the "Hanukkah Situation" in that post (not to be confused with the Bonnie Situation), and wanted to open up a discussion about […]

This past holiday season I found myself embroiled in a somewhat heated discussion surrounding seasonal music, parents, and students. The story is familiar to many of us: A Jewish child, in a choir affiliated with the public school system, was performing on my college holiday program. This child expressed discomfort in singing Silent Night. The […]

In a study published last December, the University of Cambridge reported on the discovery of a new manuscript fragment that shows the use of polyphony, written around the year 900. That’s about 100 years earlier than any other manuscript we know of. The piece was discovered by Giovanni Varelli, a PhD student from St John’s […]