Latest Blog Posts

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 […]

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?” […]

Liz Garnett writes about membership “churn”: You are constantly having to cover the basic ground for new members, which leaves less time for building on them to develop advanced skills. And a piece you worked up to a good performance standard just a few months ago loses its polish much faster if 25% of the […]

So some brain researchers want to find out what part of the brain is involved in the emotion of embarrassment. Fine. They get a bunch of test subjects and put them under a brain scanner. But they had to reliably induce the embarrassment response in order to study it. How to do that? Of course, […]

Found this late this afternoon on The Fredosphere:   Richard Nixon’s life has inspired more operatic creativity that the lives of all other U.S. presidents put together.   And the news article from the New York Times that inspired it!

It is time for another occasional podcast, this time with Ken Berg, composer and conductor from Birmingham, AL.   Even though Ken is a very successful and much-published composer, he's recently started a new website for distributing his music.   Why would a popular composer do something like that?  Listen to Ken's answers – it […]

I am in deep admiration of composers who are working hard to publicize their works to the community of conductors.   Donald Patriquin started his own website a couple of years ago – I publicized it here.  More recently, he’s come out with a major new work timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of […]

A presentation from the Chicago Conference – Presented by NATS at ACDA:     Vocal Mistructions – Presented by NATS at ACDA – PowerPoint PDF View more presentations from National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS)

Barber’s setting of “The Coolin’” is on my mind this morning – it is a text and setting that continues to haunt me:   Come with me, under my coat, and we will drink our fill of the milk of the white goat, or wine if it be thy will. And we will talk, until […]

There is a National Geographic program now airing on television called Eating With Cannibals http://on.natgeo.com/if2F4p  The host of the program is Piers Gibbon, and his journal is available on the program website. In one journal entry, he interviewed a cannibal (apparently, now reformed) in Papua New Guinea, that was from the Biami tribe. Through the […]