Latest Blog Posts
Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the positive
Chris Rowbury points to a familiar experience of choral directors: Things are going swimmingly, the choir are eating up the new, complex song you’re teaching them, even though it was a bit of a risk introducing it. They sound great, they’ve mastered the tricky rhythms and are clearly having fun. Then you see the one […]
Shaping Your Vision for 2012
At my first American Choral Directors Association National Leadership Conference in the summer of 2008, I asked members of ACDA's National Board to give me names of outstanding leaders across the country with which they were familiar, that I might contact for a conversation toward my own mentoring. My desire was to learn the life […]
Buxtehude’s daughter
Composer and creative writer Kurt Knecht comes through again, this time with an inventive story about Buxtehude: So, when someone showed up to audition, Buxtehude would pull the applicant aside and say, “This is a really sweet gig. Lübeck is a great town. The congregation is very supportive. The organ is fantastic. Oh, by the […]
Hallelujah from an Eskimo Village
A variation on a familiar effect. Link for the embedded-impaired: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyviyF-N23A
Advice for lost graduate students
Ariel Rubinstein gives some entertaining advice for grad students in econ which might apply to music as well: Do not attend too many seminars in your own field. Otherwise you may simply end up adding a comment to the existing literature, which is mostly made up of comments on previous comments which were themselves only […]
Sunday Inspiration: Corala Armonia
Happy New Year!
My “Tenth” Lesson, of King’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols
In 2004 while on sabbatical study leave in Cambridge, England, and thanks to the kindness of my faculty sponsors there, my family and I were able to attend the annual King's College Lessons and Carols service that takes place in the King's College Chapel on Christmas Eve. As the program states, "the service starts a […]
Ouch! The truth hurts
This from an article titled the Choral Dirge – complaints about choir concerts. I agree with most of them: 1. Composers like to write tediously slow, earnest music. Most of the contemporary repertoire sounds like a dirge, with the same superficially complex harmonies borrowed from the Lauridsen and Whitacre cannons. There’s little rhythmicality and joy […]
Sicut Cervus – chant online
I first shared these chant videos on the ChoralBlog on July 22, 2011. Take a moment to enjoy this Sicut Cervus and work towards performing more chant in the coming year!
Blogs that enrage (or inspire) us, part 1
It is that time of the year when we take stock of our efforts. I don’t think we’ve ever done that with the blog here, so I did this year. I was interested in the blogs that inspired ChoralNet members to respond. This is what I found. As of December 13, 2011 there were […]