Latest Blog Posts

A compelling new website I just found, Killing Classical Music, a site “dedicated to rescuing the world’s best music from a slow, certain death at the hands of tired traditions and oppressively ordinary thought.”   On it, I read this great post about “spaces.”   At some point, any discussion about re-imagining the possibilities and […]

An interesting way to use Garage Band! (Part 1 and Part 2)   Ever done anything like this? Listening to students individually takes time—a precious commodity for choral directors. MENC member Shari Tarleton uses GarageBand to assess her choral students individually in a group setting, and it’s saved a lot of time and effort.   […]

acappellanews gives us another great article about how singing brings health benefits. Speech and Language therapist and cofounder of The Brainwave Singers Robin Matthews said “We know that singing makes us feel good. Now science is discovering how singing can help people suffering from Parkinson’s to Aphasia (stroke),” he said. “Singing uses different parts of […]

A world record, it seems: A choir of 2,000 attempted to set a world record on Saturday by singing one of Switzerland’s best-loved traditional songs, a herdsman’s melody from canton Fribourg. Saturday’s performance at Villars-sur-Glâne was recorded on camera, and a legal attestation will be sent to the Guinness Book of Records for approval. The […]

I applaud every move in the book publishing industry as authors go direct to their customers and I long for the day music publishing abandons the paper-postage business model.  (You’ll find recent posts of mine on the topic here, here, here, and here.   In an article published on Gizmodo, Micheal Ashley charts the benefits […]

Our long-anticipated registration for the 2011 American Choral Directors Association Chicago National Conference opens this week, and I am pleased to share all of the exciting details.   We return to Chicago, Illinois this year for the National ACDA Conference the week of March 9-12, 2011. Chicago was home to our 1999 National Conference, the […]

NBC is sponsoring a Show Choir competition.     Look here for details and dates:   IMPORTANT DATES: Wednesday, September 29th: Launch Friday, October 15th: End of Competition Thursday, October 21st: Announce 4 Finalists on-air Friday, October 22nd: Announce Winner on-air Wednesday, November 10th: Winners fly to NYC Thursday, November 11th: Winners perform on-air   […]

In yesterday's ChoralBlog, we read Tim Sharp's excellent preview of the 2011 ACDA National Conference in Chicago.  On the heels of that, I want to speak briefly about the audition process for the 2011 ACDA Honor Choirs in Chicago that ended on October 1st.  I want to take a moment to celebrate the process, because […]

In 1971, Abbie Hoffman wrote a book entitiled Steal This Book as a countercultural manifesto. The equivalent in the digital age is to encourage people to share recordings of your performances:   At the Straight No Chaser concert in Fort Wayne on Friday night, the typical ban on recording the concert was lifted. “We wouldn’t […]

  Watch it all the way to the end (only 30 seconds). h/t Chris Rowbury, who has a bunch of good suggestions for handling chatting during rehearsals with adults.