Latest Blog Posts

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!)   Dreaming in Darkness by Robinson McClelland SATB divisi a cappella (click for PDF and AUDIO) Level: High School or higher Uses: General […]

CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS: OKLAHOMA CITY, by Paul Carey   Get ready for ACDA Dallas – it’s almost here! And yes you can still jump in and join us for an incredible experience.   As you may know, I have been sharing personal memories of the last four national conferences – we hope that reading these vignettes […]

Singing a single note is easy, right?  Well that depends.   Try holding a single note for a few seconds.  Where does the pitch want to go? Down, of course.  Now hold it for 15 seconds.  A little more challenging.  Now hold it for 37 seconds . . . while the other sections of the […]

Handing out paper in a rehearsal is almost always a disaster: the sound of shuffling papers, the inevitable “I lost it,” always having too many copies or not enough, typos that aren’t discovered until it’s too late… Let’s take a couple of minutes and get rid of this “handing out notes” chaos forever using two […]

This is something I prepared for one of my choirs some time ago to help them think about phrasing and musicality. Even though I wrote this some time ago, it still represents much of what I think is important. I began with the quotes I gave in an earlier blog:   Harpsichordist and Pianist Ralph Kirkpatrick: “The […]

While most of the material published recently on ChoralNet and the ACDA website has focused on the forthcoming 2013 ACDA National Conference, a massive amount of energy has already been invested in preparation for the seven Divisional Conferences that will be taking place a year from now.   Though certainly more intimate than a national […]

  In celebration of the ACDA Poster being named a Gold Winner in the annual ADDY competition, ACDA is “sharing the love” by offering a free copy of the award-winning poster and a copy of the new the CD, Commissions, if you JOIN ACDA or RENEW an expired membership by the time the ADDY award […]

Consider the humble round (AKA canon).   A single line of music that can be repeated endlessly (thus, it goes “round and round”), and when layered within itself can form vertical harmonic structures.  Of course, the first round most of us learn is the ubiquitous and oft-maligned “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” – a melody […]

(An excerpt from the Choral Journal article, “Elements of Empfindsamkeit in the Heilig, Wq.217 (H.778) of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach,” by Brian E. Burns.)          The choral music associated with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach is, in large part, not the music he actually composed. The vast majority of music that he directed after his […]