Choral Journal

An Introduction to Jennifer Higdon’s Choral Works

July 4, 2022 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The June/July 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “An Introduction to Jennifer Higdon’s Choral Works” by William Skoog. The 2023 National Conference will feature a premiere of the ACDA Brock Commission, composed by Jennifer Higdon. Read an introduction to the composer’s choral works in the current June/July issue acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.
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Mention the name Jennifer Higdon to most classical musicians, and the response is near universal recognition for her instrumental compositions. Her Violin Concerto won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010, and her Percussion, Viola, and Harp Concertos won Grammy Awards in 2010, 2018, and 2020, respectively. She has earned awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In opera circles, as well, Higdon has been hailed as a rising star due to the enormous success of Cold Mountain and anticipation for her new opera, Woman with Eyes Closed.

Though she has achieved success in orchestral and operatic genres, there appears to be little awareness, even among choral musicians, of her accomplishments as a prolific composer of quality choral music. Since her first music for choir was published in the late 1990s, she has written twenty-five choral pieces, three of which are large-form works with orchestra. A current list of her total choral output is provided at this article’s conclusion. This article brings Higdon’s choral works to light, introducing a representative sample of her compositional techniques. Her choral compositions can at first impression be perceived as transparent and accessible, but upon closer scrutiny, the devices behind these effects are quite challenging.

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Slightly more than half of Higdon’s texts are secular; the rest are spiritual. Of the latter, some draw from Christian traditions, while others are inspired by mysticism or a broad sense of spiritualism detached from any specific religion. These texts tend to focus on topics of longing, time, eternity, and humanistic being. Whether Higdon selects a text herself or agrees to one selected by a commissioning agent, it must align with her personal instincts.

She explains:
If the text doesn’t resonate with me, how can I expect to write a convincing work that the audience can relate to? If I don’t connect with a text, I think listeners would hear a kind of insincerity come through.

From Matt to Matthew to All of Us: A Cathartic Transformation in Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard

June 20, 2022 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The June/July 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “From Matt to Matthew to All of Us: A Cathartic Transformation in Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard” by Andrew Hon. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.
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Considering Matthew Shepard (2016) by Craig Hella Johnson is a powerful musical response to the death of Matthew Shepard (1976-1998), a University of Wyoming student murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, allegedly because of his homosexuality. Being one of the first Passion settings that takes on an LGBTQ+ subject, the 105-minute work of three parts—Prologue, Passion, Epilogue—is Johnson’s most ambitious composition to date. The piece is scored for mixed chorus, vocal soloists/narrators, piano, clarinet, strings, percussion, and guitar. Johnson set a wide range of poetic texts by Hildegard von Bingen, Rumi,1 Lesléa Newman, and Michael Dennis Browne; additional texts were sourced from Matt’s own notebook, words from his parents Judy and Dennis Shepard, and newspaper reports, compiled and crafted by Johnson and Browne. The work premiered in 2016 in Austin, Texas, with Conspirare, conducted by the composer; and was featured at the Western ACDA Conference in Pasadena, California, in the same year.

Despite its rising popularity in the North American choral scene, Considering Matthew Shepard has not received much attention in academia, partly due to initial exclusivity for Johnson/Conspirare. The full score was made available to the public in 2019. One of the reasons for the work’s success is Johnson’s highly accessible musical style, which is effective in engaging everyone regardless of their background. This article examines the core messages of universality and inclusivity in Considering Matthew Shepard by showing a cathartic transformation embedded in the work’s narrative and music—one that leads to a deeper understanding of the human condition and a hope of an eventual reconciliation for all. Examples will be drawn from traditional Passion settings and relevant social justice issues. Matthew’s story is timely and relevant not only in the United States but globally.
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Read the rest of this article in the June/July 2022 issue of Choral Journal.

Social and Emotional Learning for Choirs: Strategies for the Classroom

June 6, 2022 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The June/July 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Social and Emotional Learning for Choirs: Strategies for the Classroom” by Colleen B. McNickle and Coty Raven Morris. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.
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Students in choir explore, experience, and process their emotions through music making in a social setting on a daily basis. Using music as a vehicle for expression, choir teachers have the opportunity to facilitate conversations and musical experiences that allow their students of all ages to interact not only with their own emotions, but also with the emotional expressions of their classmates, school communities, and music communities at large. Whether they know it or not, most choir teachers are implementing tenets of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in their classroom regularly. The goal of this article is to share ways choir teachers might intentionally imbed SEL in their everyday interactions with students to benefit the social, emotional, and musical elements of a choral classroom.

Educational leaders at state and local levels are promoting SEL at unprecedented rates. Researchers predict that schools and districts will be adopting SEL more quickly during the coming years in response to increased reports of student emotional challenges following social isolation, high levels of student stress and anxiety, and a loss of engagement. For the past two decades, researchers and educational leaders have shared that learning is a social and emotional endeavor and that the arts are particularly suited to explore social and emotional processes. Choir classrooms can be a natural hub for this sort of learning: students socialize and build community within their sections and ensembles; singers explore the spectrum of emotions through varied repertoire; and choirs express those emotions daily through performance.

Choir students, however, do not gain social and emotional skills simply by participating in choir. A choir teacher with an SEL focus must intentionally integrate SEL constructs into their teaching and everyday interactions with students. By singing and performing, listening to, and analyzing musics from a variety of composers and contexts, singers at every age have the opportunity to interact with a plethora of social and emotional constructs. Although the idea of SEL may feel elementary, we have found fundamental benefits to intentionally addressing social and emotional skills with choristers in school, university, and community or church ensembles. In this article, we discuss the key components of SEL; the ways in which choir teachers may weave SEL into their lessons, expectations, and classroom culture; and provide activities and discussions that may enhance the social and emotional learning that is so important for the choral ensemble. Although this article focuses on students in the choral classroom, most, if not all, of the tools we discuss are appropriate for elementary, secondary, post-secondary, community, and church ensembles. It is never too early or too late to address SEL competencies.
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Read the rest of this article in the June/July 2022 issue of Choral Journal.

Rejuvenating France’s Choir School Tradition: An Interview with Mark Opstad

May 23, 2022 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The May 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Rejuvenating France’s Choir School Tradition: An Interview with Mark Opstad, Artistic Director of La Maîtrise de Toulouse” by C. Michael Porter. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.
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Woven into the DNA of England’s choral identity are the traditions and contributions of its choir schools. These storied institutions—including Cambridge’s King College School, Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral School, Cornwall’s Truro School, and St. George’s School at Windsor Castle—are often synonymous with our perception of the English choral tradition. Their curriculum have shaped generations of musicians—such as Christopher Tye, Henry Purcell, Herbert Howells, and David Wilcocks—and while they have responded to contemporary social and aesthetic issues, they have ensured the continuation of England’s cherished choral standing. The choir school tradition is by no means solely an English invention.

Many countries have similar celebrated organizations: including the Thomasschule in Leipzig, the Vienna Boys’ Choir, and the Saint Thomas Choir School in New York. However, no country has carried on this musical training as faithfully as England. When Mark Opstad, himself a product of England’s choir school tradition and Assistant Organist of Clare College at Cambridge University, accepted the Professor of Choral Music position at the Conservatoire in Toulouse, France, in 2006, he brought with him the English choral proclivities of his home country. It was only a matter of time before Opstad established the celebrated La Maîtrise de Toulouse—a choir school associated with the Toulouse conservatoire and partly based upon the English choir school model. Since its founding, La Maîtrise de Toulouse has become one of France’s leading youth choral organizations…

PORTER: Was it a challenge for you to bring this idea of a choir school to France? You mentioned that in the 1980s there was a revival, but you were coming from an English choir school tradition. How different were the traditions, and was this difficult to implement?

OPSTAD: That’s an extremely interesting question. I thought it was going to be very easy at first. After two years being the assistant at Caen Cathedral, I was looking for somewhere to move on to. I actually wrote to all the major cities in France which didn’t have choir schools and presented the project of creating a choir school. It was the director of the conservatoire of Toulouse who responded and said, “This is an incredible idea, you must come and do this here.” I was basically given the job to create it. However, he didn’t tell me he was retiring.

So, I arrived in Toulouse, and his successor just did not understand at all what I was trying to do. The first three or four or five years were extremely hard, and I thought this just isn’t going to work. But at the same time, I couldn’t accept defeat. So, I kept pushing and pushing and eventually got it off the ground. Finally, when I was able to show them what I was talking about—when I got the structure in place where the children were singing every day—then from that point on it was just lift-off ! When that director moved on a few years later, and a new director came who was an organist (organists always understand choir better), I was given basically all the means I needed to do what I wanted. I was able to prove what we were capable of doing.

Just when we thought things were really fi ring on all four cylinders, and just as we celebrated our tenth anniversary, suddenly the local education authority tried to close us down, accusing us of being “elite.” They couldn’t stand the fact that these children were doing something so extraordinary. It wasn’t the same for all of the children so it couldn’t be possible. And that involved a huge fight: including a petition with 6,000 [people in support of us], and influential people talking on the radio, and recruiting former government ministers to fight for our cause. We did actually manage to overturn that. So, to answer your question, it’s often been a huge challenge.

Read the rest of this article in the May 2022 issue of Choral Journal.

Musical Moments with Philip Brunelle – Composer Resource

May 16, 2022 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

One of the many challenges that leaders of community choruses faced when Covid-19 lockdowns began in March 2020 was figuring out how to sustain a connection with their audience members in the absence of live performances. The forced cancellation of concerts nationwide led Philip Brunelle, founder and artistic director of VocalEssence and organist choirmaster at Plymouth Congregational Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota, to conclude that his imperative was “to give people a sense of joy when they were stuck at home.” Capturing the interest of viewers meant that the project needed to be musically stimulating and visually engaging; and to help with the latter, Brunelle enlisted his son Tim Brunelle, a marketing professional and videographer, to work with him on the project.

With father as creative director and presenter and son as videographer, the team set about creating a one-of-a-kind video catalogue of choral composers whose compositions have been performed by VocalEssence or the adult choir at Plymouth Congregational Church over the past fifty-three years. They titled the series Musical Moments, and the first video debuted on March 23, 2020, featuring Dominick Argento (1927-2019), an American composer who lived most of his life in Minnesota. To Brunelle, Argento “was just a natural…I had studied with him, I had performed a lot of his music and I commissioned him.” Each individual composer video is eight to ten minutes in length, but in the project’s last week the daily videos were expanded to include eight brief composer “snapshots” rather than focusing on a single composer and were lengthened to twelve to fifteen minutes each.

Their initial plan was to make fifty videos, but as the pandemic continued, Brunelle and his son decided to keep going. The completed Musical Moments project encompasses a total of 330 videos, of which 320 feature one composer, five feature eight composers, four show Brunelle discussing general topics related to choirs, and one is a conversation between Philip and Tim Brunelle about the project. Altogether, the series examines a total of 361 composers. The final episode aired on July 2, 2021.

Read the rest of this article, along with a table of selected composers, at acda.org/choraljournal
Musical Moments project: https://www.vocalessence.org/category/musical-moments/.

June/July Choral Journal Preview

May 9, 2022 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The newest issue of Choral Journal is available online. Following is a list of the articles you will find in this issue.

ACDA members can log in with their username and password to view and download the newest edition. You can also read our electronic version. If you are not already a member of ACDA, join today to start receiving your monthly Choral Journal!

FEATURES

Social and Emotional Learning for Choirs: Strategies for the Classroom by Colleen B. McNickle and Coty Raven Morris

From Matt to Matthew to All of Us: A Cathartic Transformation in Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard (2016) by Andrew Hon

Evolving Identity: Four Works by Tarik O’Regan by Jason Vodicka

An Introduction to Jennifer Higdon’s Choral Works by William Skoog

ARTICLES

Streaming Live Music: What You Need to Know by Music Publishers Association

ChorTeach Replay
Healing Our Singers, Healing Ourselves—Social and Emotional Learning in Choir by Lindsey Blackhurst and Robin Freeman

Rehearsal Break
What’s in Your Vocal Model? Establishing a Voice Quality Ideal in the Choral Rehearsal by Brian J. Winnie

Book Reviews

Choral Journal Index for Volume Sixty-Two