Latest Blog Posts

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 […]

(From the Choral Journal article, “The Choral Music of Antonín Dvořák: A Sesquincentennial Review,” by John Guthmiller)   Antonín Dvořák once described himself as a “simple Czech musician.”  This may seem an unduly humble self-characterization. However, Dvořák was in many ways quite simple. He was a man with an elemental faith and unpretentious habits, a […]

(From the Choral Journal article “A Prayer for Peace Now: Britten’s War Requiem Revisited, by Charles Matoni.  A performance of the War Requiem will be a special feature of the 2013 ACDA National Conference.)   The War Requiem is obviously [Britten’s ] profoundest work. It is the most dramatic and unnerving setting of the Requiem […]

NEWS FLASH:  There is a difference between boys and girls.   Despite the efforts of those who would seek to androgenize the species, no amount of PC babble is going to change certain things.  Face it: we boys can be a little squirrely (and some of us never quite outgrow that). Rather than try to […]