Latest Blog Posts

The situation:   1.  An incoming student, passionate about choral music, wasn't scheduled to attend orientation until the day before school started in August. 2.  Auditions were scheduled to be completed at the end of June.   The solution:  a skype audition   It worked very well!   I had heard about voice teachers using […]

A fascinating video about how musicians communicate expressivity, discussed here on the website “brainpickings.” The interplay between music and emotion, which we explored on Monday with 7 must-read books on the subject, is undeniable. But if most of us ordinary people are so powerfully affected by music, we can only imagine what that experience must […]

International award winning University of Maryland:    

Two American University Choirs did very well in the 2011 Florilege Vocal de Tours Competition last week:  The University of Maryland and the University of Houston.     Maryland was directed by Edward Maclary who also won the prestigious "Prix du Chef de choeur" – an award given to a conductor for his expert direction […]

This is a great idea for taking notes at conferences or for students in your classes:  using one google document with multiple editors.  I just read about this on the Chronicle for Higher Education Website, but I’ve advocated it for a couple of years: Just minutes before my lightning talk, I created a relatively simple […]

I was in New York City over Memorial Day and stumbled upon a terrific concert of Bach cantatas by Julian Wachner and the Trinity Choir from Trinity Wall Street church.   What a concert!  They were superb – excellent singing, crisp diction, outstanding orchestra.   They are putting on a series called Bach @ One […]

Following up on my earlier post about Arabic choral music, ChoralNet user John Neal points me to the Tehran Vocal Ensemble: Of course, they perform primarily in Farsi and English, not Arabic. John points to the mixed genders of the ensemble; maybe Iranian culture isn’t as oppressive as news media makes it seem?   They’ve […]

Important administrative audits inside institutional life are always in danger of becoming the victim of benign neglect, and discussions about what some would call “administrivia” can become the object of clichés or relegated to the cynical domain of “buzzwords.” In my academic life, corporate-speak that spilled over into academic-speak, often attempted innovation, but also created […]

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a challenge to the 1994 Mickey Mouse protection act which extended copyright terms and retroactively re-copyrighted some works which had passed into public domain: The dispute that led to Golan v. Holder dates to 1994, when Congress passed a law that moved vast amounts of material from the public domain […]

For Memorial Day, an excerpt of Vaughan Williams' setting of Wildred Owen Walt Whitman's poetry, sung by the Atlanta Symphony chorus, conducted by Robert Shaw:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zfHiloldtg