Latest Blog Posts

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 […]

Minnesota Public Radio features an item on a St. Olaf Choir performance of music by Abbie Burt Benitis. The audience sat silently, transfixed by the beauty and creativity of the piece and granted the composer a prolonged ovation. At intermission she was besieged by admirers. Abbie is the grand-niece of Christmas-carol composer Alfred Burt.