Latest Blog Posts

“Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.” Margot Fonteyn Jamie*’s highly auditioned and highly respected community chorus sing at a (you can guess) high level. Though not a professional chorus, they are often used by a local […]

THE PROBLEM How many of us love to teach our choirs and voice students about the ubiquitous schwa, the most common unstressed vowel used in spoken English? Posters, T-shirts, special schwa cheers, and other creative teaching tools are employed by voice teachers and choral conductors in the tutelage of this vowel. Here is a common […]

For me, part of recharging means engaging in creating art. Often I feel much better after having sung in a choir. Last week, I had the great opportunity to attend, participate, and sing in the Illinois Bach Academy (IBA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where we rehearsed and performed the St. Matthew Passion […]

The June/July 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “From Matt to Matthew to All of Us: A Cathartic Transformation in Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard” by Andrew Hon. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction. _________________ Considering Matthew Shepard (2016) by Craig Hella […]

“I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.” Alexander the Great  Many of you read the title of today’s Blog and understood exactly what I was writing about. You might know someone who is a member of a […]

Have you heard of MasterClass, an online collection of classes featuring an amazing line-up of famous folks? They hooked me when I saw they had a class by Bill Nye (the science guy) and Amanda Gorman. Months later, who knew I needed to know how to become a ninja or learn how to make electronic […]

With this post, we welcome choral conductor and certified meditation teacher Steve Grives in his first post for a bi-weekly blog entitled Midweek Meditation. This blog will address issues pertinent to choral professionals through the lens of mindfulness and meditation. He will write about his own meditation practice, share some stories from his professional life, […]

Nominations are being accepted for the next Julius Herford Prize, which will be awarded for a dissertation by a student earning their degree in 2021. This award recognizes an outstanding doctoral terminal research project in choral music. Projects are eligible if they comprise the principal research component of the degree requirements, whether the institution defines […]

Many people think they are speaking truth to power, but they are really just preaching to the choir. This episode deals with the role of political discourse in the lives of all citizens, and educators in particular. The future of education is hanging in the balance right now as I see it, based on the […]

“If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow This is not the Blog I had planned to write this week. I had planned to write about our concert on Sunday, how this is the concert we originally planned for Spring 2020 […]