Latest Blog Posts

First, a Hanukkah piece from our own Paul Carey – so beautiful:       Next, the airport security guys have formed a choir!  Although it seems a bit questionable to me, I can't ever complain about a group of people bonding together to sing.  This article from the LA Times gives a few more […]

The American Choral Directors Association has added an exciting NEW FEATURE to the ACDA website – exclusively for ACDA members. Thanks to a special arrangement with Naxos, ACDA members can now enjoy “FIRST LISTEN,” a program that previews excerpts from 15 new choral recordings before they are released to the general public.   “We are […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

A variation on a familiar effect.     Link for the embedded-impaired: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyviyF-N23A  

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 […]

Happy New Year!

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 […]

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 […]