Choral Journal Preview

March Choral Journal Preview

February 4, 2019 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The newest issue of Choral Journal is now available online! Following is a preview of the articles you will find in this issue. Read it now at acda.org/choraljournal.

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! Associate members can join for only $45 a year.
___________________________________

–Charles Ives and Techniques of Choral Narrative: Exploring Three Harvest Home Chorales by Derek J. Myler

–Giving Music a Hand: Conducting History in Practice and Pedagogy by William Southerland

–Choral Reviews

On the Voice
–Seven Essential Voice Science Tools for Choral Singing by David Harris

New Voices in Research
–Telemenn’s Brockes-Passion: A Case for Performance by Christopher Eanes

Hallelujah, Amen! A Section Focused on Music in Worship
–The Choral Music and Compositional Style of McNeil Robinson by Jason A. Wright
–Sacred Music Choral Reviews by Timothy Powell

2019 National Conference Preview

November 26, 2018 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The January issue of Choral Journal will be a preview of the 2019 National Conference in Kansas City, Feb 27-March 2. This issue will be available online December 1 and will contain the full listing of interest sessions and conference performances with dates and times, including specification of gold and blue tracks.

This will be an exciting conference, with tried-and-true offerings along with brand-new opportunities for networking, learning, and listening. Look for the preview issue coming soon!

We are very excited to invite you to join us in Kansas City for our Diamond Jubilee 60th Anniversary Year!

Our February issue will contain the full program book with ALL receptions, meetings, sessions, performances, and other offerings. Don’t miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime event. We will see you in Kansas City!

Three Windows into Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms

November 5, 2018 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The December issue of Choral Journal is now available online! The cover article for this issue was written by Michael Slon and titled “Three Windows into Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.” Below is an excerpt of the article, and you can read it in its entirety in the December 2018 issue! Go to acda.org/choraljournal and click “Search Archives.”
Choose December 2018 from the dropdown menu.
********

In mid-1964, Leonard Bernstein began an unusual year-long sabbatical from his directorship of the New York Philharmonic. The main project on tap: write a musical on Thornton Wilder’s apocalyptic play The Skin of Our Teeth, with the collaborators of his youth—Adolph Green and Betty Comden (with whom he’d written On the Town and Wonderful Town).

Alas, by early 1965 the friends had gone their separate ways, and Bernstein reported to colleague David Diamond that he was “a composer without a project.”1 But the year was not entirely lost. In April and May he completed work on Chichester Psalms, commissioned by Rev. Walter Hussey and the Chichester Cathedral in Sussex, England, for their 1965 music festival with the cathedrals of Salisbury and Winchester.2 The piece has been a staple in the choral repertory ever since, and its unusual genesis from musical theatre roots is likely one of the principal reasons.

At the same time, Chichester Psalms participates in Bernstein’s broader project—spanning decades—of exploring and responding to what he called a “crisis of faith” (a crisis running parallel to his compositional struggle with the state of tonality), and it is helpful for performers and listeners to have some sense of this. The work stands chronologically between two larger compositional projects, the 1963 Symphony No. 3 (Kaddish) and Mass (which opened the Kennedy Center in 1971), in which he repeatedly addresses and attempts to resolve these perceived crises. And while each of these works responds and proceeds in different ways, Chichester offers both a détente in these crises and a particularly hopeful view in its resolution.

In this centennial Bernstein year, the following essay offers three windows into the work: a look at its unusual musical sources, a brief consideration of its crisis of faith context, and an interpretive view of its closing chorale.
********

Read the rest of this article in the December 2018 issue of Choral Journal!The Choral Journal is a benefit to members of ACDA. You can join ACDA today and start receiving Choral Journal in your email and mailbox! Visit acda.org/membership or click here!

December Choral Journal Preview

October 29, 2018 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The newest issue of Choral Journal will be available online Thursday, November 1. Since we always publish a month ahead, this is the December issue and the last of the 2018 calendar year! Following is a preview of the articles you will find in this issue. Be looking for it at acda.org/choraljournal on November 1!

Three Windows into Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms
by Michael Slon

What is Written on Our Choral Welcome Mats? Moving
Beyond Performative Culture Toward a More Just Society
by John D. Perkins

Leonard Bernstein at 100 and a Father’s Educational Legacy
by Don Trott with Alexander Bernstein

The 2018 Symposium on Research in Choral Singing Conference Report
by Patrick K. Freer

Unity Through a Mass by Harry Cecil

The Legacy of Choral Singing: A Directors’ Choir Experience
by Gene Peterson

Book and Recorded Sound Reviews

Coming to America: Differences between the US and UK Choral Systems

October 22, 2018 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The November 2018 issue of Choral Journal contains an article titled “Coming to America: Differences between the UK and US Choral Systems” by Christopher Gabbitas with Simon Carrington and Gabriel Crouch. Below is an excerpt of the article, and you can read it in its entirety in the November 2018 issue! Go to acda.org/choraljournal and click on the November cover image.
*****

For the past fifteen seasons, I have had the privilege of singing as the Second Baritone in The King’s Singers, the British ensemble that has, perhaps in many ways, defined the world of a cappella performance for the past five decades. In 2016, I decided that 2018 would be my final year in the group, for personal and professional reasons.

On the personal side, I found that having a wife and three young daughters and being on the road for over 200 days each year was not a great recipe for success! On a professional note, I felt that fifteen years with the King’s Singers was the right amount of experience to take what I’d learned and apply it elsewhere. In addition, I felt it was good for my professional development to move on. The King’s Singers works collaboratively, with all six members contributing equally (in theory) to both on- and off -stage discussions.

I had picked up so much from my colleagues since I first joined, and once I became the longest-serving singer I felt that I’d gleaned enough to want to direct an ensemble on my own rather than by committee—and also to hand down the knowledge about ensemble singing I’d been fortunate to absorb.

I am often asked what I perceive are the main differences between the UK and US choral systems. I wonder this myself, to be honest, and in fact I am not the only King’s Singer to go down this route: all three long-serving Second Baritones in the group—founder member Simon Carrington, Gabriel Crouch, and now myself—have taken this path. I contacted both Simon and Gabriel and asked them what they found so attractive about American choral education and how they could add value to the system. First, however, I asked them to talk about their personal and professional reasons for leaving The King’s Singers.

Simon Carrington: At some point during the group’s twenty-third year, Alastair Hume and I, the two surviving founder members, decided we would try and make it to the end of the group’s Silver Jubilee year and then step aside, we hoped with voice and dignity still reasonably intact! We were both fifty-one by the time of our 3,000th and last concert on December 13, 1993. That was stretching the limit for used ensemble singers for whom the daily obligation of pinpoint accurate entries on pianissimo high notes was becoming ever more troublesome!

Opera singers can change their Fach and their character roles as they age; ensemble singers have to remain forever youthful. The fact that David Hurley later managed twenty-six years singing on the top of the ensemble, rather than tucked away safely one in from each end, remains a source of wonder and admiration!

Gabriel Crouch: You know, I was so happy in The King’s Singers that, even after completing eight years and turning thirty, I would very gladly have committed to another decade with the group and sung with them until my voice gave out.

But after getting more closely involved in the group’s educational work in my later years, I started to see another career path for myself—the path I’m now on— and I was acutely conscious of just how much there was to learn about conducting, teaching, music making, and leadership before I would be truly ready for that career. As a thirty year-old, I felt still-young enough to learn all these new things, and crucially, as a (then) single man, I could comfort myself with the knowledge that, were I to mess it all up, the only life that would be affected would be my own.
*****

Read the rest of this article in the November 2018 issue of Choral Journal! The Choral Journal is a membership benefit to ACDA members. View membership levels by clicking here or going to https://acda.org/membership.

Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service: A Personal Commentary on the Music and its Legacy

October 15, 2018 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

The November 2018 issue of Choral Journal contains an article titled “Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service: A Personal Commentary on the Music and its Legacy” by Nick Strimple. Below is an excerpt of the article, and you can read it in its entirety in the November 2018 issue! Go to acda.org/choraljournal and click on the November cover image.

This article is the third in a series that highlights themes and programming that will be part of ACDA’s 2019 National Conference in Kansas City. You can see a preview of the second article in this series here.
**********

During the 1960s when I was a university student, Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) was presented in music history class as an important composer of the second rank whose attractive and often powerful music was worthy of study and, occasionally, performance. His music was based on old modes, and he was, therefore, lauded by musical conservatives for having managed to avoid all of the gimmicks defining the various then-current attempts to break with the nineteenth century: the rhythmic and tonal complexities of Igor Stravinsky and Charles Ives, the serialism of Arnold Schoenberg, the polytonal jazz of Darius Milhaud, and so on.

On a superficial level, his music sounded a little like Ralph Vaughan Williams (the occasional augmented seconds notwithstanding) and his Concerto Grosso No. 1 was acclaimed, correctly, as a primary example of Bloch at his very best. He was also the only major composer to have set the Jewish Liturgy in the same way that composers had been setting the Ordinary of the mass for centuries. I will always be grateful to my professor for including this last piece of information in his lecture. But I am still bothered by his slight discomfort with the inevitable questions that followed: Why have Jewish composers not composed for their liturgy; and, perhaps more important: who are the Jewish composers?

I have come to understand that his reluctance with the first question was the result of benign ignorance. After all, until very recently virtually no one outside the Jewish community (including musicologists) knew any of the journeymen composers who were writing for Jewish services, just as people in the Jewish community (including composers and other musicians) knew nothing about Flor Peeters, Martin Shaw, Jane Marshall, Gordon Young, Carl F. Mueller, Pietro A. Yon, or other composers writing for churches. In the 1960s, Solomon Sulzer and Max Helfman were unknown names to most musicians, and Louis Lewandowski’s justly famous Hallelujah was so frequently performed in English by American high schools, colleges, and churches that most people didn’t know the composer was Jewish. It was relatively easy to assume that Bloch’s Avodath Hakodesh was, in fact, the only unified setting of a Jewish liturgy.
***********

Read the rest of this article in the November 2018 issue of Choral Journal! The Choral Journal is a membership benefit to ACDA members. View membership levels by clicking here or going to https://acda.org/membership.