Latest Blog Posts

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 […]

Found this from some Samford Faculty via Facebook:    

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 […]

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 long week has ended! The victory is celebrated! Take a rest, church musician.

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 […]

ChoralNet contributor Michael Parker informed me of this:  

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 […]