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!)     The Maid of Culmore arranged by Joseph Gregorio SATB divisi a cappella (click for PDF and AUDIO) Level: High School or […]

Caine, Matthew Thomas. Todor Popov: A historiography and a conductor’s analysis of his choral cycles.  Doctor of Musical Arts dissertation.  University of South Carolina, 2010.   The purpose of this document is to introduce the choral community of the United States to the choral music of one of Bulgaria’s most celebrated composers of the twentieth […]

  Enjoy ALL of the "It's About the Phrase" features!

Back to the idea of creating a positive culture in your choir:   Expectations are a large part of how our singers learn a culture. These can be (and are) the expectations we have for our singers: Are your expectations clear? (would your singers be able to articulate them if someone asked them?) Do your […]

So, you’ve strived for years to develop a choral program to the point where it is strong enough to earn one of the coveted spots on an ACDA national conference.   Then what do you do?  You step off the stage and allow the choir to perform without you.  It is, after all, about the […]

Bring up the topic of home-schooling among a group of educators and you can be assured of a vibrant discussion.  A study by the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) estimates that in the spring of 2010, there were more than two million home-schooled students, K through 12.  That accounts for about four percent of […]

(An excerpt from the Choral Journal article “Choral Music and the Humanities” by Don Malin)          Thoughtful music educators are agreed as to the importance of stressing the Humanities in education in our present scientifically minded age. Music has much to contribute toward keeping the Humanities in proper perspective and, in the areas of […]

We all start life as babies, babbling incomprehensibly.  Eventually, we learn to speak.  Then we sing.  After that, if we’re lucky, we join our voices with others to create textures of astonishing beauty.  (The comparison is so striking that we highlighted it in From Babbling to Beauty, a short “commercial” promoting the 2012 ACDA divisional […]

Listen and recall the vision of a man who dreamed of a day when people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  

COMPOSITION SPOTLIGHT ~ by Jack Senzig   The pieces that are discussed in this blog series are given the Silver Platter Award for repertoire.  This award began last year before the series started, therefore some of the very best works in the showcase have not been displayed here.   I would like to share these gems with you […]