Latest Blog Posts

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 […]

Sweden — A new art project got under way at the mall in Handen on Sunday when all of a sudden 12 people began to sing. The project is called Konsten i Centrum. A bit of a word play. Art in the (Shopping) Centre might be a possible English translation. This first part of the […]

Here is news of an exciting seminar offered in October that explores the future of choral music in church as well as how to be a choral musician – more proof that ACDA is about more than conferences and journals these days.  Here is the message of the conference:     “A unique affirming learning experience […]

ACDA has announced an exciting opportunity for composers and church musicians this summer – once again proving that ACDA is much more than one convention a year!   Look here for a compelling place to learn the art of composition with composers Chen Yi and Steven Sametz as well as hear your works performed by the Princeton […]

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 […]