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Choral Journal

March/April 2022 – Choral Journal Preview

February 14, 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!

ARTICLES

Toward “Transcendence”: Music and Meditation in Michael McGlynn’s O Maria
by Seán Doherty

Dialogue with Five Contemporary Canadian Choral Composers by D. Geoffrey Bell

Attention or Autopilot? Motor Learning and the Choral Warm-up by Christopher Loftin and Matthew Hoch

We Hold These Truths: Defining Access, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Restorative Practice by Ahmed Anzaldúa, Noël Archambeault, Joshua Palkki, André de Quadros,
Mari Esabel Valverde, and Arreon A. Harley-Emerson

Operationalizing Your Diversity Goals through Repertoire Selection by Caron Daley

Connecting with Our Student Members through National Events and Student Chapters by David Edmonds

REVIEWS

Book Reviews

Filed Under: Choral Journal Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, Choral Journal, Choral Journal Preview

A Conductor’s Guide to Katarina Gimon’s Elements

February 7, 2022 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The February 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Contemporary Choral Music in the Classroom: A Conductor’s Guide to Katarina Gimon’s Elements” by Christina Beasley. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.
_________________

Contemporary music allows the performers to create their own interpretation of the piece and take ownership of the composition that is being presented to their audience. With aleatoric sections of a piece, the performers have control over what the piece sounds like at any given performance, and this sound is always changing. Through the freedom of graphic notation, students are encouraged to make their own conclusions and creatively decide how they want the music to sound. This provides an engaging individual experience for the singer and a communal engagement in the anticipation of what the other choir members will do. Contemporary music in this context is important because it gives choral conductors the opportunity to explore diverse works within the classroom. This diversity does not just come from diverse notation, sounds, and exploration of the human voice but also diversity through polystylism, commonly found in contemporary music.

Many twenty-first-century compositions are using experimental techniques such as graphic notation and aleatoric passages while still making the music accessible to amateur or younger choirs. Canadian composer Katerina Gimon explores aleatoric singing, graphic notation, overtone singing, and body percussion in Elements, her 2013 composition for mixed choir. This piece is approachable and appropriate for singers in the classroom and is a wonderful way to introduce a youth choir to some extended techniques of the voice.

Elements is a choral work written in four movements, each depicting one of the four classical elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Each movement begins with a set of words used to describe the characteristics of the element. Elements “explores the wide capabilities of the human voice—from overtone singing, to vocal percussion, to colourful vocal timbres.” There is no text throughout the piece except in movement two, “Air”; otherwise, only phonemes are used to convey the feeling of each element. “Fire” is commonly performed alone. In 2019, the Vancouver Youth Choir performed “Fire” at the ACDA National Conference in Kansas City, MO. The performance showcased the explosive and energetic piece with an ensemble of singers aged 15-24. Watch the performance at the link here.

Read the rest of this interview in the February 2022 issue of Choral Journal.

Filed Under: Choral Journal Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, Canadian, composer

Choral Journal Preview: The Choral Music of Florence Beatrice Smith Price

January 24, 2022 by Amanda Bumgarner 2 Comments

The February 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “The Choral Music of Florence Beatrice Smith Price” by Stephen Caldwell. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.

_________________

The Florence Beatrice Smith Price Collection in the Special Collections Department at the University of Arkansas began in 1974 as The Florence Price Papers. It was originally a small collection of pictures, letters, and manuscripts donated by Price’s daughter. The collection was expanded in 2014 after the discovery of new documents. New attention came again to the collection in 2018 after G. Schirmer acquired the worldwide rights to Price’s catalog. It is the goal of this article to illuminate the available choral music of Florence Beatrice Smith Price and discuss her remaining manuscripts, in hopes that it can reach a broader audience through the support of choral musicians across the country.

In 1974, Price’s daughter donated what little materials she had of her mother to the Special Collections Department at the University of Arkansas. Several of Price’s works remained in publication and received performances in the latter half of the twentieth century, but much of her unpublished music was lost. More than forty years later, unsuspecting real estate shoppers Vicki and Darrell Gatwood acquired an abandoned house in the Chicago suburb of St. Anne, Illinois. It was in terrible condition and required extensive demolition before renovations could begin. They arrived with dumpsters ready to discard the detritus, when they noticed some handwritten music and a reoccurring name on many of the papers—Florence Price.

The Gatwoods did some internet searches, soon realizing that Florence Price was a composer of some note. They reached out to specialists, who found the house contained a treasure trove of manuscripts, photographs, letters, and other artifacts. After some time, University of Arkansas Special Collections sent representatives to review the collection. In 2014 they were able to acquire all the documents and merge them with the collection already housed, becoming the Florence Beatrice Smith Price Collection at the University of Arkansas. Many of the artifacts have since been digitized and are available to view online.

Filed Under: Choral Journal Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, Choral Journal, Choral Journal Preview

Diverse Embodiments: How COVID-19 Expanded Choral Practice

January 17, 2022 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The February 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Diverse Embodiments: How COVID-19 Expanded Choral Practice” by Caron Daley. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.

_________________

COVID-19 chipped at the foundations of the choral art, sending out a shock wave of fear regarding the newfound dangers of group singing. Remote, hybrid, distanced, and outdoor rehearsals introduced cumbersome protocols and procedures. Performances were canceled and moved into virtual spaces. Emergent choral practices seemed decontextualized and perceptually and educationally inferior. Essential questions arose, such as, “If a choir is made up of a group of interconnected singing bodies, does a choir still exist if the singing bodies are not in physical proximity, or if singers cannot hear one another singing?”

Day to day, choral musicians experienced a loss of social connection and source of fulfillment, including the opportunity to mitigate the stresses imposed by the pandemic through choral singing experiences.1 For those who contracted COVID-19, otolaryngologic symptoms such as “dysphonia, cough, sore throat, loss of smell, nasal blockage, rhinorrhea, and headache” affected their ability to sing.2 For some, this included long-term symptoms such as lung damage, vocal fold paralysis, and chronic fatigue—symptoms that endanger professional singing careers.3 For countless musicians, the pandemic brought unwanted losses of income and economic instability.4

There are many important lenses through which to view the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the choral profession. This paper will explore these effects from the theoretical perspective of embodiment, defined as “an effect where the body, its sensorimotor state, its morphology, or its mental representation play an instrumental role in information processing.”5 Embodiment undergirds all aspects of choral practice. For example, can you picture the sights and sounds of the choral room? Breathe in the smell of the carpet. See the location, position, and height of the podium in your mind’s eye. Can you hear a favorite choral piece being sung, or feel the thrill of the final cadence in your bones? Imagine the choristers as they spill into the room, poised to learn new skills, pursue musical artistry, and strengthen social bonds.

The pandemic reconstituted many of these familiar experiences, introducing new ways to learn and perform choral music. This article seeks to explain how embodiment was expressed through pandemic choral practices, asking: (1) How did the loss of in-person singing bring greater awareness to the body’s involvement in choral singing? (2) As we return to singing, what new instructional possibilities exist in a diversely embodied choral practice?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Notes
1 Helena Daff ern et al., “Singing Together, Yet Apart: The Experience of UK Choir Members and Facilitators During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021): 8.
2 Dylan Vance et al., “COVID-19: Impact on the Musician and Returning to Singing; A Literature Review,” Journal of Voice (2021): 2; Lynn Helding et al., “COVID-19 After Effects: Concerns for Singers,” Journal of Voice (2020): 7-8.
3 Helding et al.
4 Daff ern et al., 7.
5 Anita Korner et al., “Routes to Embodiment,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1.

Filed Under: Choral Journal Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, COVID-19

February 2022 – Choral Journal Preview

January 10, 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. Below is a preview of the articles you will find in this issue. If you are not already a member of ACDA, join today to start receiving your monthly Choral Journal!

ARTICLES

Diverse Embodiments: How COVID-19 Expanded Choral Practice by Caron Daley

The Choral Music of Florence Beatrice Smith Price by Stephen Caldwell

Inside the Choral Classroom: Advice for the First-Year Teacher (Part 3) Compiled by Amanda Bumgarner

Contemporary Choral Music in the Classroom: A Conductor’s Guide to Katarina Gimon’s Elements by Christina Beasley

REVIEWS

Book, Recorded Sound, Choral

2023 National Conference Information

Filed Under: Choral Journal Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, Choral Journal, Choral Journal Preview

CJ Replay: Choral Singers “In the Zone”

December 27, 2021 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The December 2016 issue of Choral Journal ifeatures an article titled “Choral Singers ‘In the Zone’: Toward Flow through Score Study and Analysis” by Christopher Walters. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Search the December 2016 archives menu in the sidebar. Following is a portion from the article.

_________________

The bell rings abruptly during your Concert Choir rehearsal. One of the basses exclaims: “Class is over already? That was fast!” You suddenly realize that you and your ensemble’s intense concentration has been snapped out of one of your best rehearsals of the year. You immediately register that every chorister appeared particularly engaged and productive, and that the collective music making seemed to achieve an especially high level of artistry, accuracy, and focus. Indeed, an alto adds: “It’s like we were in the zone or something!”

Though perhaps a bit simplified, the above scenario depicts what choral musicians have likely experienced at least once in their musical lives—a type of optimal experience now codified in what is known as the psychological construct flow.(1) Flow has achieved popular familiarity through how athletes commonly describe such moments—namely, as being “in the zone”—and certainly represents the type of experience toward which we all strive as choral conductors. It is the heightened subjective state where we feel at once completely absorbed, highly challenged, and decidedly capable in a given activity; where a distinct period of ostensibly effortless action seems to stretch or even fly by; and upon looking back at such experiencing, we process it as among the best moments in our lives.

A term first coined in 1975 by the noted research psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,(2) flow(3) has garnered significant scholarly attention over the past forty years, informing multiple areas of inquiry, including psychology, sociology, education, sports and leisure, business, medicine, motivation theory, attention theory, and the visual and performing arts.(4) To be sure, music has been dubbed a “quintessential flow activity,”(5) and flow is now an important and relevant area of serious music education research.(6) For the astute choral conductor, then, this begs the following queries: What, if anything, can the choral conductor do to account for flow in rehearsals or performances? Is it possible to intervene in such a manner as to essentially create flow among our singers? And if so, how might we do it?

The purpose of this article is to assist with answering such questions by outlining one viable way in which to incorporate Csikszentmihalyi’s flow concept into the general perspective of the choral conductor. In light of the current literature, conductors can very likely set the conditions prone to foster flow in choral singers. This can be accomplished by way of applying the high challenge-skill balance “dimension” of flow to the conductor’s essential task of score study, which results in the analytical necessity of identifying “salient potential challenges.” This approach can serve as an example for other conductors to emulate and modify in their particular contexts so that our singers may indeed become so capably immersed in their music making that rehearsals seem to fly by.

Notes

1 For the seminal texts, see: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990); and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
2 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1975).
3 Used interchangeably in the literature with the flow experience, flow theory, the flow concept, the flow model, flow state theory, etc.
4 See, for example: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, eds., Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Concept of Flow,” in Handbook of Positive Psychology, ed. C.R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 89-105.
5 Lori A. Custodero, “Seeking Challenge, Finding Skill: Flow Experience and Music Education,” Arts Education Policy Review 103, no. 3 (January/February 2002): 7.
6 Sarah Sinnamon, Aidan Moran, and Michael O’Connell, “Flow Among Musicians: Measuring Peak Experiences of Student Performers,” Journal of Research in Music Education 60, no. 1 (April 2012): 6-25.

Filed Under: Choral Journal Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, Choral Journal, CJ Replay

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