Latest Blog Posts

  Curtis E. Hansen, the only remaining living ACDA steering committee member, celebrated his 90th birthday on March 18. Hansen, along with steering committee members J. Clark Rhodes, Elwood Keister, Harry Robert Wilson, R. Wayne Hugoboom, Archie Jones, and Warner Imig, were ACDA’s founding members. They held a very important luncheon meeting on February 23, […]

Paul Carey, composer-blogger, calls it like he sees it in this rant against music publishing.   He speaks against:   1.  Formulas They hope we will consistently give them what they want (speaking in the choral publishing world for now, as that is what I do the most): a formulaic 3-4 minute piece, with an […]

This is the best I could come up with for April 15:    

Don’t miss this interview from NPR on Bobby McFerrin and his new album. On any given night, McFerrin can be found delicately walking a tightrope of vocal improvisation, carrying nothing more than his four-octave vocal range and his childlike sense of play. Next month, he’ll sing and conduct an orchestra in Italy. It’s not a […]

Hat tip, A Cappella News: Teichfischer, 31, lost her job in publishing two years ago. “We thought if you bring people together who have the same situation, then things will be much easier to form a social network,” she says. “It’s really worked out.” She and about three dozen others meet two mornings a week […]

I write this on the morning after my Birmingham Concert Chorale completed a successful performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.  What a work!    It is a pity that I didn’t enjoy the work until the night of the performance.  We only had two months to prepare it – and that is quite difficult for a […]

Dan Kreider gives us another essay – this one about the essence of rhythm:   it’s essential that we transmit the essence of the indicated rhythm – not merely the mathematically correct moment for the musical events. The details of rhythmic units are usually easily identified and altered to convey the meaning behind their construction. Of […]

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 […]