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(An excerpt from the interest session, "Is It Really THEIR Voices? Teaching the Urban Youth Choir," by Nicole Becker & Jeanne Goffi-Fynn. Presented during the 2013 ACDA National Conference.)          A person's voice is their means of expression in their everyday lives. They have lived with their voices, they are comfortable with them, it […]

(An excerpt from the interest session, “The Legacy of Lawson-Gould” by Alice Parker with Sally K. Albrecht and Michael Spresser. Presented during the 2013 ACDA National Conference.)          Walter Gould and Robert Lawson Shaw established the Lawson-Gould choral catalog in 1953, first publishing the music of Alice Parker and Robert Shaw, consisting primarily of […]

(An excerpt from the interest session, “Sweat, Tears, and Jazz Hands: The History of Show Choir from Vaudeville to Glee,” by Mike Weaver. Presented during the 2013 ACDA National Conference.)          As any American choral historian knows, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians were doing show choir before show choir was cool. Long before television, […]

(An excerpt from the panel session, “Paradigm Shift:  The New Conductor/Composer Dynamic,” by Deborah Simpkin King. Presented during the 2013 ACDA National Conference.)   PROJECT : ENCORE™ is an initiative formed for the purpose of promoting post-premiere performances of significant new choral music.  It takes the form of a continually-expanding, robustly searchable database of premiered […]

(An excerpt from the interest session, “Paradigm Shift:  The New Conductor/Composer Dynamic,” by Reginald Unterseher.  Presented during the 2013 ACDA National Conference.)          My perspective on the evolving way that conductors find and purchase music is formed by my experience as a composer and as an R&S Chair.  I am part of both the traditional […]

(An overview of the interest session, “Conducting Women’s Choir: Strategies for Success,” by Debra Spurgeon. Presented during the 2013 ACDA National Conference.)          This session featured a panel of 12 conductors who had contributed chapters to the new book titled Conducting Women’s Choirs: Strategies for Success (GIA Publications). Each author spoke for about five […]

COMPOSITION SPOTLIGHT ~ by Jack Senzig   (Each week we look at a piece of useful repertoire from the ChoralNet Community Composition Showcase.  A variety of voicings and levels of difficulty will be presented.  Enjoy!)   You Having Walked This Earth https://choralnet.org/306016#youhavingwalked4557   by Joseph G. Stephens  SATB some divisi and brief soprano solo a cappella (click for PDF and AUDIO) Level: High School or higher […]

There are a variety of great tools online to help with foreign language text. Google Translate, for example, can help us determine the meaning of a musically-important word in a text setting, and great online dictionaries abound. Of course, many great editions give text translations out of the box, but sometimes we really want to […]

New choral music is important, and its promotion and support equally so. A premiere is often the focus of a concert, and there are ensembles that specialize in premiering new choral works. But what happens to those pieces after the first performance? How do we find them to give them another voice?   PROJECT : […]

Back to rehearsal technique after recovering from ACDA!   Verbal: Don’t talk too much! By the same token, in varying pacing, there can be good times to let them sit back and talk about the background of the piece or something similar – it’s also efficient to take “pencil” time to give all markings for […]