Latest Blog Posts

Jennifer Howard, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, alerted me to this discussion regarding how technology intersects with the scholarly aspects of music making: The ‘content focus’ is a set of editorial projects that implement digital technology in different scholarly disciplines: specifically literary and cultural studies, history, classics, archaeology, and music. While the technical features […]

ChoralNet member Robert Eaton sent me a link to this website following my blog post yesterday on the iPad.   forScore, an upcoming app for the iPad, describes itself this way: forScore was designed as a way to take thousands of pages of score with you on the go.  With innovative features like the audible […]

I didn’t know that I was going to buy the iPad when I entered the Apple store – I told myself I was going to “look.”  Something took hold of me about 10 seconds after I walked in and I knew that I would be purchasing the device.   I love it.  It is more […]

Minnesota Public Radio features an item on a St. Olaf Choir performance of music by Abbie Burt Benitis. The audience sat silently, transfixed by the beauty and creativity of the piece and granted the composer a prolonged ovation. At intermission she was besieged by admirers. Abbie is the grand-niece of Christmas-carol composer Alfred Burt. 

Dan Kreider has another thoughtful blog post up, this one daring to go into communication with the audience: Simply put, art is perception. Although many 20th-century composers adopted the mantra of Milton Babbitt (“Who cares if you listen?”) and often ignored their audience completely, the inescapable fact remains that the essence of art is not […]

I have a friend who sings in a women’s choir, and after their conductor/den mother died of breast cancer, they got in a new conductor who has, shall we say, an XY chromosome. I have commented that that must have changed the family feel of the group somehow, but my friend has always denied that. […]

I had heard some of these before:   6. Bach married twice. The first to his cousin, Maria, the second marriage was to Anna Magdalena Wülkens. However, it is now believed that he also had relations with and fathered children of a local bar maid called Helga Schümaker, who bore him an unknown number of […]