Latest Blog Posts

The hunt for literature is an almost daily adventure for a choral conductor  Yet what may be seem a common piece for you may be brand-new to me – and vise-versa.  So we share these selections in the hope that something is of interest to you.  Enjoy a choral performance with piano and clarinet from […]

Ever try to reach someone for an important matter only to discover that they had changed their e-mail address (or phone number, or postal address)?  Annoying, isn’t it?   Multiply that by tens of thousands, and you might begin to understand the challenge of keeping track of ACDA members.   We are a mobile society […]

The Choral Journal: An Index to Volumes 19-52 has been updated to include annotated and cross-referenced entries for the latest volume year (Vol.52).  The current Index includes entries for 4,167 articles published in the Choral Journal from 1979 through the June/July issue of 2012.  It is available to anyone – acda member and non-member alike […]

Some many moons ago, the departmental musicologist and senior-most faculty member (a loveable chap and wanna-be curmudgeon) walked up to me after a concert and said, "Good job . . . but it wasn't really a choral concert because it didn't include Brahms."  We shared enormous fun in the ensuing years over that comment – […]

As you read this, a great many of the conductors who have been asked to perform at the next ACDA National Conference are agonizing over the selection of literature for their performance.  But they needn’t worry!  Those of use who will be in the audience are eager for them to share from the astonishing variety […]

(From the Choral Journal article "Implications for Non-Verbal Communication and Conducting Gesture" by Joseph Kevin Ford)          The subject of gesture has been clearly documented as a serious matter for discussion since the first century.  All societies use gestures as took for communication, but gestures do not have universal meanings. A gesture that means […]

(From the Choral Journal article "Ottorino Respighi's Laud To The Nativity" by Lee G. Barrow)          Ask a musicologist to name the most important Italian composer of the early twentieth century, and the answer will likely be Alfredo Casella, or Gian Francesco Malipiero, or perhaps lldebrando Pizzetti. But ask a concert-goer to name a […]

(From the Choral Journal article “Black Gospel Music and Its Impact on Traditional Choral Singing,” by James Benjamin Kinchen, Jr.)   Black gospel music is becoming an increasingly popular and pervasive part of Black! American culture. Gospel music is accepted more today than ever before; more people are singing it and listening to it. Many […]

Richard Sparks pointed me to this article that exposes the decline at Sibelius Software.  It seems the parent company, Avid, has elected to fire the programmers and make a “clean profit” over the next couple of years.  By then, they will have made their money and then they will sell off the company: Sibelius is […]

(From the interest session “When Music Meets Theology” presented during the 2012 ACDA North Central Division Conference.)          A Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and a Serbian Orthodox teen walk into a hotel ballroom, along with a Jewish cantor and a Catholic school choral director . . .        But seriously, folks: the 2012 […]