Choral Journal

Is it Time to Rethink the “Conventional” Model of Youth Choir?

November 28, 2016 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

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The June/July 2016 issue of Choral Journal was a focus issue with articles and columns pertaining to sacred music. One article titled “Soul Searching: Is it Time to Rethink the ‘Conventional’ Model of Youth Choir?” by Eric L. Mathis. The author posits in the introduction that in the twenty-first century, a “conventional” model of youth choir does not exist.

He says, “There is no cookie-cutter model of youth choir ministry in the twenty-first century. Everywhere we look, youth choir ministry looks different, and that can be both encouraging and perplexing for those of us engaged in the task of youth choir ministry. The primary goal of this article is to ask a pastoral question of youth choir directors. Admittedly, this is not a musical question, but taken to its full lengths, this question will have significant musical ramifications. The question is this: As pastoral musicians committed to the spiritual and musical development of teenagers, how do we best cultivate a generative faith that is rooted in a relationship with God, nurtured by the faith community, and important enough to extend beyond adolescence?”

The article contains three parts: 1) The relationship between the study, congregations, and the climate of youth ministry in the United States. 2) Recent cycles in music and worship and observations about how these cycles have impacted youth choir ministry. 3) Asking the question how those of us who lead student choirs might adapt our practices in light of current research about the faith lives of teenagers in the twenty-first century.

This brief ChoralNet blog will address four theological accents to realign priorities discussed in part three of the article.

How can we better use creeds—theology, principal tenets of the Christian faith, and the God-story—to instill deeper faith in our teenagers?

• A conductor in Iowa decided to choose her youth choir repertoire by theology rather than music. Rather than say, “I need a global anthem in my repertoire,” she said, “My teenagers need to better understand journey through suffering.” She realized this is a theme in music from the Hispanic culture and found that theology and a global anthem

How can we better instill within our teenagers a sense that they are part of a much larger and intergenerational community that regularly participates in and enacts the God-story?

• One part-time musician had trouble finding time to rehearse youth choir and recruit significant numbers of teenagers. In his soul searching, he learned that parents are the single most influential factors in the religious lives of teenagers.After conversation with a friend, he decided to imitate the African American church choir model by doing away with children, youth, and adult choirs to make intergenerational choirs the norm rather than the exception. (The African American community has a larger number of youth involvement in religious choirs than any other!)

How can we better help our teenagers comprehend a sense of the purpose they have in the God-story as present members in the faith community?

• One conductor decided to reverse the performance/ rehearsal/mission ratio for three months out of the year. In these three months, the youth choir rehearsed anthem literature one week out of the month for two hours and Soul Searching: Is it Time to Rethink CHORAL JOURNAL Volume 56 Number 11 25 spent the other three to four weeks engaging in mission projects related to music therapy in the nursing home, music education in lower socio-economic, and music advocacy with a local public school system.

How do we instill deep hope in teenagers so they learn to find hope outside of themselves and better anticipate the work of God in the world around them?

• One youth choir director took seriously research claiming teenagers don’t actually learn anything of lasting value on short-term mission trips like his youth choir was accustomed to taking. He admitted that teenagers receive the deepest sense of connection to the values of their congregation through ongoing mission endeavors where they develop long-term relationships with individuals. With the support of his leadership, they abandoned summer trips and began a routine schedule of worshiping with residents in a homeless shelter and eating with them afterward.

You can read the rest of the article online here. (Note: you must be an ACDA member and logged into ACDA.org to view the Choral Journal online.) If you are not an ACDA member, you can become one here for $45 for an associate member or email me () to request a copy of this issue of Choral Journal for further reading ($3/copy + shipping).

Choral Singers “In the Zone”: Toward Flow Through Score Study and Analysis

November 7, 2016 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

In the December 2016 issue of Choral Journal, author Christopher Walters wrote an article titled “Choral Singers ‘In the Zone’: Toward Flow Through Score Study and Analysis.” Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first coined the term “flow” in 1975, describing a type of “optimal experience” 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.”

The purpose of this particular article is to help conductors examine what they can do to account for flow during rehearsals or performances and how they might even create flow among singers.

Today’s blog will highlight just one point from a section of the article titled “Teaching Toward Flow,” which addresses the question:
What specifically is the conductor to do in the choral rehearsal itself to account for flow?

“To begin to teach toward flow, the choral conductor must structure a rehearsal in which singers perceive that they are highly and continually challenged, and yet capable of meeting every challenge being presented. In plain terms, choral conductors must read or intuit their ensemble and respond in rehearsal accordingly. Keeping singers in the high challenge-skill balance channel, as much as is possible—where the perception of challenge is high but where the perception of skill to meet that challenge is also high—is the universal pre-condition for flow in the choral context. Through the use of rehearsal language and feedback, flow-minded choral conductors may increase flow proneness for their singers by encouraging them to see difficult passages as attainable and yet also see “easy” passages as more challenging than they might at first blush. How such work might be accomplished in any given context surely varies by conductor, ensemble, piece of music, day of the week, barometric pressure, etc.”

Are you familiar with the concept of flow? What insights can you add to the author’s observations about how to account for flow in the choral rehearsal?

You can read the rest of the article online here. (Note: you must be an ACDA member and logged into ACDA.org to view the Choral Journal online.) If you are not an ACDA member, you can become one here or email me () to request a copy of this issue of Choral Journal for further reading ($3/copy + shipping).

Creating Choirs that Welcome Transgender Singers

October 31, 2016 by Amanda Bumgarner 1 Comment

The November 2016 issue of Choral Journal included an article written by Jane Ramseyer Miller titled “Creating Choirs that Welcome Transgender Singers.” This was adapted and revised from the California ACDA newsletter. There has been much conversation about the topic of gender as it relates to choral music classrooms, and some of this was discussed in the November 2015 issue of Choral Journal with the feature article by Joshua Palkki, “Gender Trouble: Males, Adolescence, and Masculinity in the Choral Context.”

Jane Ramseyer Miller’s article on transgender continues this discussion and is intended to assist choral music educators with their task of making choir a safe and welcoming space for all singers. Whether or not a conductor personally agrees with a singer’s decision to transition between genders, it is the teacher’s job to support students where they are, being a safe place for expression and guidance, specifically when it comes to our voices.

As part of the article, Miller shares 12 tips for making chorus more welcoming for all students, specifically transgender. A few tips are below, and you can read the full article by clicking here (note you must be a member of ACDA to read the Choral Journal online).

When posting for singer auditions, keep language about voice parts gender neutral.
Invite all singers to audition for any solo that fits their vocal range.
Use gender-neutral language in rehearsal and insist that all section leaders and singers also follow these same guidelines.
Assign voice sections for each singer dependent on their voice range and voice color rather than gender. If a singer is transitioning, check their range every 3-4 months and assist them in moving to a new vocal part as needed
Examine requirements mandating gender-specific concert attire. Forcing singers into gender-specific (or incongruent) clothing may be seen as a public devaluing of identities and communicates indifference to the spectrum of gender identity and expression.

Do you have any tips to add? Have you had an experience with a transgender student in one of your choirs?

CJ Replay: The Life and Works of Four Female Canadian Composers

October 24, 2016 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

In October 2015, the Choral Journal featured an article on the life and works of four female Canadian composers: Kathleen Allen, Sarah Quartel, Stephanie Martin, and Ramona Luengen. The choral culture of Canada is vibrant and diverse, and readers will appreciate the opportunity to read about the life and works of these established and “up and coming” composers. Two sidebars are included in the article for further interest: one is a list of other notable Canadian composers, and the second is a list of Choral Journal articles that have previously been published on female Canadian composers and their choral music. A short feature of the four composers is printed below. (Read the full article here)

Kathleen Allen (b. 1989)
Featured Works: “In Paradisum” (published in 2014 by Cypress for an advanced SATB choir and soprano soloist) / “The Close and Holy Darkness” (commissioned by the Savridi Singers Women’s Choir in 2012, features text from “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas)

“For Allen, the process of composing is often a slow one. She spends considerable time seeking the most fitting musical means by which she might elevate a text to express it in a way that is both meaningful to her and authentic to the text.”

Sarah Quartel (b. 1982)
Featured Works: “Alice” (accompanied SSA work published by Oxford, commissioned by Marie Anderson) // “Snow Angel” (extended five-movement work accompanied by piano, cello, and djembe; versions are available for both the treble and mixed choir.

“Quartel takes great care in selecting texts that resonate and that evoke images of personal significance…Until recently, she composed many of her own texts, but in discovering the poetry of others, she has found her works taking on a greater diversity of color and sound.”

Stephanie Martin (b. 1962)
Featured Works: “Hear My Prayer” (published in 2009 by Cypress for an advanced SATB choir) // “Tantum Ergo” and “Alleluia” (published by Cypress as a set but can be performed individually and with any combination of voicings)

“For Martin, it is her love of words that guides her approach. A ‘musical picture,’ as she puts it, typically emerges from the text—‘somehow,’ she comments, ‘the words always suggest the music.’”

Ramona Luengen (b. 1960)
Featured Works: “Mesange” (published in 2013 by Cypress for an advanced mixed choir) // “How the Blossoms are Falling” (commissioned in honor of the late Diane Loomer on the occasion of her retirement from the internationally acclaimed Elektra Women’s Choir; composed in 2008 and published in 2014 by Cypress)

“The impetus for her writing of choral and vocal works is ‘always, first and foremost, the text.’ Of this, she says, ‘I generally search for my own [text], even in a commission situation, for I find there needs to be an essential compatibility of language between the poet and the composer.’”

You can read the full article online in PDF format by clicking here. (Note: You must be logged into the acda.org site as a member in order to access the Choral Journal online. If you are not already a member of ACDA, join today!)

Kirke Mechem: Songs of My Old Age

October 18, 2016 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The current issue of Choral Journal features an article on composer Kirke Mechem, who turned 91 earlier this year. Mechem has been called the “dean of American choral composers” and is still an active composer, adding to his impressive catalogue of over 250 works. This article provides readers with a compositional history for eight choral works that Mechem himself calls the “songs of my old age.” They are, he says, “one way or another, about singing…and I either wrote the texts myself or translated, edited, adapted, or juxtaposed parts of public-domain texts.”

As the article states: “One of the most compelling characteristic about Mechem’s vocal music is his meticulous attention to text and its marriage to music… From the start, Mechem and dramatic interpretation of text expression were inseparable: storytelling was always at the fore. Personally selecting a text with which he could tell a story was also inextricably linked to music creation. He rarely accepted commissions for which he could not have a part in text selection.”

One unique feature of this article is that it includes links to audio clips of Kirke Mechem dramatically interpreting the text from eight choral works. (Musical examples are included in the article but due to copyright are not shown in this post.)

Here is one example: We Can Sing That (2012) – Op. 79, no. 2 (SSAA) and Op. 79, no. 3 (SATB), unaccompanied.

“Mechem fashioned this original poem when conductor Eliza Rubenstein and he could not come to an agreement on a commission text for her Orange County Women’s Chorus.” Listen to Mechem reading his poem by clicking here.

CJ Replay: Expanding Students’ Musical and Vocal Ideals in an Urban Community Children’s Choir

October 3, 2016 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The February 2016 issue of Choral Journal featured an article by Nicole Becker and Jeanne Goffi-Fynn titled “Discovering Voices: Expanding Students’ Musical and Vocal Ideals in an Urban Community Children’s Choir.” This article offers readers “an approach to choral training that seeks to broaden children’s musical ideals and abilities by training them in healthy, flexible vocal technique within a rehearsal environment that values and nurtures students’ diverse forms of musicality.”

Their goal, the authors write, is to “empower young people to discover their voices” by “unleashing the potential of their singing voices [and] leading singers to realize that their voices—their opinions, interests, ideas—matter.”

This approach has been specifically developed through the authors’ work with a non-auditioned community chorus for children ages 10-14, based at an urban graduate school of education. The results, however, can be applied to many singers across a variety of age ranges.

After discussing three parameters of vocal technique—registration, resonance, and breath management—the authors present a sequence of 5 vocal exercises that coordinate this approach to vocal training. The first two exercises are below. (If the image appears small, you should be able to click on it to enlarge.)

In the second part of the article, the authors highlight 5 empowerment strategies for rehearsals that cultivate esteem and agency. Following is a brief overview of each:

Repertoire by Request: “We have a white board on which students are invited to write their suggestions for repertoire and other requests for rehearsal… We let them know that their tastes and their music matter to us and shape what we do.”
Solos: “In traditional choir settings, members are assigned solos when the director considers them ready. We prefer to have our singers choose solos when they feel ready, and to this end we provide frequent opportunities for them to take solos in rehearsal.”
Questionnaires and Interviews: “We regularly ask our singers to describe how they feel about chorus and about their voices in questionnaires and interviews.”
Making Texts Their Own: “In our work with texts we help our students find the ways in which the lyrics reverberate with their own experience, so they can deliver the songs in a personal way.”
Training Listeners and Leaders: “One highly effective way to promote listening and critical thinking among singers is to give them opportunities to lead portions of rehearsals.”

Have you used any of these strategies in your own rehearsals? How might utilizing vocal exercises and empowerment strategies make a difference for young singers who are discovering their own voices?