Latest Blog Posts
Can you take instruction from a woman?
Building on this blog post from last week, Sharon Hansen gives us some things to think about: What might be some of the chilly conditions that female professors of myriad disciplines experience along their tenure journey? Why do these conditions exist? Especially for the young female choral conductor, negotiating the tenure path as a […]
Music and Language
In her Exchange article Early Brain Development Research Review and Update, Pam Schiller notes new thinking on the link between music and language… "Linguists, psychologists, and neuro-scientists have recently changed their long held opinion about the relationship between speaking and singing. The latest data show that music and language are so intertwined that an awareness […]
Music Theory Entertains on YouTube
Found this from some Samford Faculty via Facebook:
Is it different if you are a woman?
I saw this on a twitter tweet: So I followed up on the article and found a short article that raised the question – is it harder to be a conductor if you are a woman? Frankly, the challenges of becoming a conductor are daunting enough without adding to them the worries of doing […]
Anti-perfect
Chris Rowbury comes out against perfection: Which is why I don’t like singers or choirs or music which is just so, so perfect. The blend is perfect, the rendition is perfect, the enunciation is perfect, the costumes are perfect. I may as well stay at home and read the score and imagine the music in […]
The End of Holy Week
The long week has ended! The victory is celebrated! Take a rest, church musician.
IMSLP under attack AGAIN
IMSLP (aka Petrucci Music Library) is the orchestral equivalent of CPDL, with tens of thousands of public-domain pieces available in freely-downloadable formats, often with instrumental parts. A couple of years ago, Universal Edition managed to get them shut down because some of the pieces hosted there which are in public domain in the USA and […]
Conan features choir on network TV – Bach Motet next?
ChoralNet contributor Michael Parker informed me of this:
A Hymn to God the Father and Cognitive Dissonance
We are ending our choral conducting class with a unit on the expressivity of text. (some of you may have seen my request for help in this forum post) Using John Dickson’s incredible article Musical Pride and Textual Prejudice: The Expressivity of Language in Choral Music from the September 1993 issue of the Choral Journal we are […]
Sing for Japan
If you are like me, when disaster or tragedy strikes the world community, after the shock subsides, there is a helplessness that sets in related to how we can fully empathize, react, and help. We look at what we do for a living and ask the question, “How does what we do make a difference?” […]