Latest Blog Posts

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Leonard Bernstein  For the month of December, I’m rerunning some Choral Ethics blogs from years past with a few modifications where needed. Two of my MOST REQUESTED December Blogs will be making their yearly appearances, including […]

Finding yourself traveling this season? How about a podcast to keep you company on that long drive? The ACDA Advocacy and Collaboration (A&C) Committee has been curating advocacy and collaboration-focused episodes on the Music (ed) Matters podcast as a place for members to spark ideas, learn, and get invigorated. The A&C series kicked off with […]

We made it through the semester.  Our return to in-person music making.  I have been reading our singers’ reflection papers, their one-page response to three prompts:  What did you learn musically?  What did you learn beyond the music?  What suggestions do you have for the future? On music, they wrote about re-learning how to sing […]

The International Journal of Research in Choral Singing (IJRCS)  is ACDA’s scholarly publication that welcomes studies that apply rigorous, systematically-grounded methodologies, either quantitative or qualitative, to investigate phenomena of potential interest to all who sing in, work with, or are otherwise interested in choral ensembles. Below is the abstract from this article written by Andrea […]

Most of what your audience members see and hear at your concert have LITTLE TO DO with how well your ensemble sings. There are ACTIONS you can take in both our preparation and at our concert to improve our concert greatly. Most of these actions are overlooked by choral directors. I know I overlooked many of these actions earlier in […]

One of the most COMMON questions to pop up, almost weekly, on choir director Facebook groups is “what do I do to help these (usually boys, not always) match pitch?!” It is usually a panic induced, “I’ve tried everything” kind of post. This short episode brings in the expert, Donald Brinegar, choral director, professor and […]

“If you think you can do better, then do better. Don’t compete with anyone; just yourself.” Bob Fosse For the month of December, I’m rerunning some Choral Ethics blogs from years past with a few modifications where needed. Two of my MOST REQUESTED December Blogs will be making their yearly appearances. Happy December! ~MLGA  Tuesday was my father’s […]

The next two blogs are going to review some of the common themes from this blog over the past 6+ months. If you’ve been reading regularly, you’ll know that this series has focused on managing music-making during COVID while also addressing ADEIB. In Part 1 of Commonalities, we will review the logistics of music-making in […]

The newest issue of Choral Journal is available online. This issue is a complete preview of the sessions and performances at all 6 ACDA Region Conferences in February and March 2022. ACDA members can log in with their username and password to view and download the newest edition. You can also read our electronic version, available at […]

I repeat 11 pieces every year at my winter concert. These 11 pieces are special to my students and our audiences. These 11 pieces are easy to learn and passed on from choir member to choir member. These 11 pieces bring our alumni back year after year. In this blog post I share these 11 pieces, video recordings of each piece for previous concerts, […]