In the January "Outlook" from The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Perry/Preston/Wallace outlines five issues facing all of us that work with not-for-profit entities, related to our dependency on grants and other forms of philanthropy. The following are the issues, followed by my ponderings related to choral music education and choral performance: 1. This year, the […]
Surviving Innovation
In a recent Wall Street Journal article (Sat/Sun, January 7/8, 2012), columnist Spencer Ante outlines how corporations survive beyond the corporate life expectancy of 40 years, and how to avoid the terrible toll of not responding to ongoing innovation. Most of us work for non-profits, but the lessons are easily applicable. Business leaders, academics, and […]
Music in our Schools
Many opportunities for the American Choral Directors Association await us individually, as well as an association, in this New Year as we engage in the process of creative collaboration. Collaboration is significantly different than its sister processes of mediation, arbitration, negotiation, compromise, or co-existence, in the fact that collaboration actually creates something new. And while […]
Make a Difference
Today begins a new era for the American Choral Directors Association as we ask all of our members to help determine the priorities for the actions and resources of our Association. Today, our Stratetic Planning Membership Survey goes live at www.acda.org, and asks our membership to weigh-in on what should be the focus of our […]
Shaping Your Vision for 2012
At my first American Choral Directors Association National Leadership Conference in the summer of 2008, I asked members of ACDA's National Board to give me names of outstanding leaders across the country with which they were familiar, that I might contact for a conversation toward my own mentoring. My desire was to learn the life […]
My “Tenth” Lesson, of King’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols
In 2004 while on sabbatical study leave in Cambridge, England, and thanks to the kindness of my faculty sponsors there, my family and I were able to attend the annual King's College Lessons and Carols service that takes place in the King's College Chapel on Christmas Eve. As the program states, "the service starts a […]