Latest Blog Posts

Recently, a friend whose choir had been invited to perform in a prestigious venue asked me to make some literature recommendations.  Though a humbling request, it was, of course, impossible.  Programming is already a massive challenge for us in working with our own choirs, let alone trying to select literature for a choir we know […]

Inspiration comes in many forms, from many places.  Here a thoroughly modern composition takes as its inspiration a chant from the sixteenth century.  Of course, there is nothing particularly earth-shattering about a composer taking inspiration from the past, but it does tend to reinforce the timelessness of the choral art form.  

Pinsonneault, Albert.  A Conductor’s Guide to Selected Choral Works of F. Melius Christiansen (1871-1955).  Doctor of Musical Arts dissertation. University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, 2009.   F. Melius Christiansen (1871-1955) created a pioneering American a cappella choral ensemble, the St. Olaf Choir, which influenced an entire philosophical school of choral performance within the United […]

I love this.   My professors at FSU were really good at explaining this hyper-narrowing of focus to me, in their own way. Still, I wish I'd seen Matt Might's explaination of the Ph.D. process then (or even better, before I'd left home for graduate school). I'm a bit thick-headed and, despite my professor's best efforts, maybe didn't […]

The idea of sharing audio with our friends, be it for practice or entertainment, isn’t a new one. Mixtapes, practice tapes and sing-along recordings have been around as long as we’ve been able to put sound to recording. Now, though, the ability to record is so ubiquitous that people are often lost on even how […]

Eric Whitacre tweeted this pic last week.  Not sure if he created it but I loved it:      

This is my first official post here at Choralnet. I'm looking forward to sharing with you all in the coming year.   I had the pleasure of working with Eric Ericson in 1993 while I was singing in the Portland State University Chamber Choir under Bruce Browne. I was a college freshman still figuring my […]

We welcome Joshua Bronfman as a new blogger for the ChoralBlog.   Dr. Joshua Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Choral Activities at the University of North Dakota, where he directs the UND Concert Choir, Chamber Choir, and Varsity Bards. He also teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in choral conducting, choral literature and choral […]

(From the Choral Journal article “The Use of French Latin for Choral Music,” by Anthony R. Reeves)   An area not fully integrated into the general practices of most choral conductors, however, concerns the use of colloquial Latin pronunciations for choral music. Some conductors feel it is simply too time consuming to work out complex […]