Latest Blog Posts

Watch as McFerrin teaches an unsuspecting audience how to sing a pentatonic scale:  

I just re-watched The Music Man on DVD the other night, and I always find the show depressing. Although it’s primarily a love story, we musicians inevitably zero in on the musical elements of a show with music as a main theme. In the final scene, the fraudulent Prof. Harold Hill is trying to conduct […]

Another excellent post by Liz Garnett. I think I’m in love! In a topic related to performance practice, she talks about performing songs which have definitive recordings by the original composers (or at least famous recordings). But if we do know exactly how the original went, that doesn’t tell us what we should do in […]

ChoralNet member Dan Kreider talks here about “listening.”   What’s the most powerful piece of music you’ve heard only once? I’ve begun devoting a significant portion of class time to listening. By now my students know the drill: no talking, no noise, focus on evaluating what you hear… and (often) close your eyes. Then I tell […]

To follow up on Philip’s post yesterday about common sense, I found myself kind of disappointed with the use of the term "common sense" in Liz’s post. She’s postulating a kind of left-brain/right-brain dichotomy and discussing how important left-brain considerations like rehearsal planning and musical analysis are, but that’s not quite the same thing as "common […]

From the 2009 ACDA National Conference:  

A great post from Liz at Helping you Harmonise: And common sense is what stops conductors getting too self-obsessed. Yes, conducting requires depth of knowledge, and insight, and interpersonal magic and a well-honed technique, yada yada yada. But none of that has any point unless the music sounds good. It doesn’t matter who you studied […]

ACDA Tech Committee Member Julie Parsons recently delivered a technology presentation at the NW ACDA Conference.   Great ideas, Julie!    Here is a bit of it, uploaded for everyone on SlideShare:     Build A Blog Online View more presentations from conductress.

A guest blogger continues the ACDA Conference Review: In a nutshell, the performance content of ACDA’s North Central Division Convention in Minneapolis rivaled the programs of every National Convention I have attended in the last ten years. For this blogger, concerts had the strongest impact during the four-day celebration of the choral arts. There were simply […]

I’m fairly sure I heard this group in Miami but I don’t remember it like I should – very beautiful: