Latest Blog Posts

“Always do right.  This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” Mark Twain My late Mom always said arrogance and ignorance are a deadly combination. As a coloratura soprano, nothing irritated her more than someone telling her how to sing or what to sing, unless they were a director or conductor she was working […]

The November/December 2023 issue of Choral Journal is available online. ACDA members can log in with their username and password to view and download the newest edition. You can also read our electronic version. If you are not already a member of ACDA, join today to start receiving your monthly Choral Journal! _ _ _ _ _ _ IN THIS […]

“Christmas isn’t a season. It’s a feeling” Edna Ferber I recently was contacted by a lovely colleague, Pete*, about an ongoing discussion during his community chorus’s rehearsals. He is not sure what to do and wants some data collected from other Choral Professionals to share with his group. I said I would write about it […]

Audiation (also called inner hearing) is the process in which pitch is produced internally in the mind of the musician, with no sound being produced out loud, and is an important skill that should be developed in singers.  In all vocal production, singers must first audiate all the musical elements (pitch, rhythm, text, vowel, dynamic, […]

Sometimes I have singers stand in two concentric circles—the smaller one within the larger one—and sing from these new vantage points.  The larger circle may be those who have stronger voices, more confidence, allowing their sound to flow through the smaller circle and across the space, leading the way by providing comfort and security. But […]

ChorTeach is ACDA’s quarterly online publication, designed for those who work with singers of all levels but specifically K-12 and community choirs. A full annotated ChorTeach index is available online at acda.org/publications/chorteach. Over 160 articles are organized into seventeen categories. For more information, email  or visit acda.org/chorteach. Following is an excerpt from an article in the Summer 2023 issue […]

This week, I connect with yet another instrumental music educator! Don’t worry, I will be fine… It was a great pleasure to speak with Dr. Angela Ammerman about many music education topics including some “controversial truths” that I found on her Instagram account, “The Music Teachers Guide.” We discussed the idea that the best music […]

“The best leaders are readers of people. They have the intuitive ability to understand others by discerning how they feel and recognizing what they sense.” John C. Maxwell Since beginning this Blog in 2015, I have been contacted by numbers of ChoralNet Readers—I like to call these folks ChoralNetters–who want to share their stories about […]

The October 2023 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Ernest Bloch’s Avodath Ha-Kodesh: A Synopsis and Detailed Program Note” by Seth Ward. Following is a portion from the article. _________________ Ernest Bloch’s Avodath Ha-Kodesh: The Sacred Service easily ranks among the Hebrew-language major works performed most often in North America. It is part […]

“Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring – an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.” John Updike I have struggled for a long time with […]