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Stories of Healing and Reimagining: Commonalities Part 1

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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 past 18+ months, and dive into what our colleagues said about the heart of teaching during COVID.

Singing has continued in some form. Many of us became audio/video editors. We’ve had premieres bumped, or conducted a concert before everything was shut down. Many choral colleagues followed the aerosol study guidelines. This study has been instrumental in helping decide what is safer and what carries too much risk. Some colleagues were asked to be more cautious than recommendations (such as not having in-person classes during the 2020-21 school year or not having a choir during a worship service), and some haven’t been allowed to follow all the risk mitigation procedures recommended (such as not being allowed to require masks in rehearsals). Colleagues have used a mix of Zoom and in-person rehearsals. In-person rehearsals have included physical distancing, masks, limiting rehearsal time, vaccine requirements, and/or regular testing. Choral colleagues have been resilient as they look for ways to promote music making, learning, advocacy, and facilitate emotional growth and support for singers.  

In both returning to music making and equity, many interviewees spoke about the importance of relationships and community building. Below, you’ll read some important moments in these conversations discussing community building.  

  • Mr. Remel Derrick: On the other hand, the community was incredible. “We are in this together” was stronger than Remel had ever experienced with his students. There was a tightening of an already close-knit group …students (and teachers) will be managing post traumatic stress. Knowing this, Remel is planning to leave space for his students to share their experiences. “[It can be] hard to talk about it when you are in the middle,” but afterwards, students may want to share, and may need additional support… He is looking for texts addressing collective grief, singing, and community.
  • Ms. Stephanie Gravelle: Some students are struggling with how to have a discussion or work collaboratively. Technique is very important, but right now they need to come into a room that makes them feel happy, safe, and wanted. Her focus will be what it always is: find the heart of her singers and have their hearts connected. 
  • Ms. Olivia Vestal: As she builds her program, community is one of her priorities… Sometimes community building has looked different than she anticipated… Her approach [is] to try to educate [students] on how to care about individual people in their community, and what that expression of care might look (or sound) like. 
  • Ms. Amanda Stevenson: But really, it was all about the community.  And that, she says, is what the singers need the most.
  • Ms. Jazzmone Sutton: “What we do is community,” Jazzmone said, “We should strive to build relationships within our space.” She did that in her teaching, and it’s how she approaches advocacy.  
  • Dr. Derrick Fox: He knew hybrid learning, masks, and shields would be barriers to connection in Fall 2020, so he created “choir families” for students to build community and process their previous spring.
  • Alan: Alan was impressed with how resilient students were, especially since he knows students need community. Related, he’s been grateful for the focus on mental health. They’ve always talked about it at some level, but there has been a deeper dive… He also wishes they had more counselors at his school… there simply aren’t enough of them to provide the academic and mental health support to large numbers of students.
  • Dr. Anne Lyman: Dr. Lyman also pointed out that sometimes less music may be performed because there was a higher need for conversation around the music.
  • Ms. Maria A Ellis: If we want to keep people singing, we shouldn’t allow anyone to feel bad if they don’t have a certain skill. We, as choral professionals, need to create paths forward.
  • Dr. Ahmed Anzaldúa: “For any justice work,” Dr. Anzaldúa said, “there has to be relationship work. Without relationship, it’s charity.” When we discuss equity work, it comes down to relationship. What’s the relationship you have with your singers, administrators, community? More importantly, what relationships are missing? Are the systems in place, whether previously designed or created by you, preventing relationships with people in your space and community? What are your relationships and what are the quality of your relationships? Even social justice-minded people can be unsure of how to respond or who to engage when confronted with a social-justice issue. He has seen that happen in organizations as well. A lot of organizations realized they didn’t have a relationship that would allow them to reach out to a community. It’s important to do authentic outreach, and whether this is in an organization or community, it requires establishing relationships.

Stories of Healing and Reimagining with Olivia Vestal

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In March 2020, spring break was extended. Olivia Vestal, now a first-year choral teacher in Durham, NC, was supposed to go to Regional NATS. Instead of performing live, she recorded a video, and remembers that was the last thing she did without a mask. After they finished, she wiped down the piano and recording equipment, and asked, “Is this good?” (referring to cleaning).

 

Olivia took the majority of her education courses after COVID had forced classes to change formats. She wasn’t sure how she was going to become the teacher she wanted to become when she wasn’t able to go into schools. Almost all of her courses needed an in person component. She wrote lesson plans she didn’t get to teach and had to give up classroom visits. Instead of observations in schools, she watched people on YouTube. She lost hours of classroom contact.

 

Her student teaching practicum in Spring 2021 began fully online. Many of these virtual days consisted of checking in with students, vocal exercises, and singing music on solfege. She would sing or call on a student to lead a passage, and students would sing with her or the student leader. All of this took time, and there were internet issues. In addition, the school mandated that she couldn’t teach for more than 45 minutes. After a couple months, school moved to cohort groups. Students would come for a week, then the next week another group would come in. The group that was not in-person attended online. Then they moved to all in-person, unless the student had chosen Virtual Academy. Until the dress rehearsal, she didn’t hear all the students sing together. As a student teacher, the only time she had to hear, evaluate, and give immediate feedback to the entire choir was during these rehearsals. She learned how to be flexible. She leaned into building community. She encouraged their exploration of music in addition to building their skills. But she missed out on training her ears, because for much of the time, she didn’t have voices in the room.

 

She continues to field constant change. In her classroom, she implemented risk mitigation measures that she knows will change based on public health. She has envisioned how she would set up her classroom if COVID mitigation strategies were not in place. She also has the normal first-year teacher issues to attend to: obligations that sometimes come to her late or unwritten program expectations, for example. It’s difficult to remember some policy and procedural things. She hasn’t given herself time NOT to work. If something doesn’t go well during the school day, she looks to her own preparedness. She finds herself having a difficult time separating work and being home. She struggles with imposter syndrome, and wonders how COVID affected her preparation to become a teacher– did she get the full experience of a teacher education program and is she really prepared? Despite the newness, her colleagues are supportive and don’t treat her as a novice. She feels a part of the team. She’s also able to connect to her students faster and easier because they’ve shared the online learning experience. Her students will say to her “You get it.”

 

As she builds her program, community is one of her priorities. Part of community building is learning foundations of music together– sight-reading, vocal technique, identifying features of octavos, aural skills. Sometimes community building has looked different than she anticipated. As an example, she had a student speak about being anti-LGBTQ+. She was taken aback by this, because she had never met a student who felt this way (or at least not a student who has expressed it). Her approach was to try to educate the student on how to care about individual people in their community, and what that expression of care might look (or sound) like. 

 

She’s making a point to learn about each student: Who are they and what do they need? She’s trying to understand all identity points, or at least the ones students share. She’s made it a priority to meet all the counselors so she has access to resources and can learn from them. The students are doing listening journals, and the singers pick the music and create the assignment to go along with it. Some music doesn’t have any text, and some music isn’t in English. It’s been a great chance to learn about what the students value and what they need.

 

CJ Replay: A Consideration of Marc Blitzstein’s Choral Opera, The Condemned (1932)

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The June/July issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “The Capitalistic Machine Against a Radical Individual” by Richard Robbins. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.

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American composer Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964) spent much of 1932 planning and composing The Condemned, an ambitious “choral opera” for four choirs and full orchestra, inspired by the trial and execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Almost ninety years later, the project, which Blitzstein considered his “best work” to date, has received little attention and still awaits its fi rst performance.1

The score remains unpublished, despite the enthusiasm of such supporters as Nadia Boulanger, and the composer’s own plans for performances in the Soviet Union and England failed to materialize. Even so, The Condemned occupies a unique position in Blitzstein’s output and in American choral music: it may be the most extensive socially engaged choral work written by an American composer during the Great Depression, and its themes would continue to occupy Blitzstein’s imagination through the end of his life.2

NOTES

1 Marc Blitzstein (MB), letter to Josephine Blitzstein Davis
(JBD), 16 October 1932. This and all letters quoted are
from the Marc Blitzstein Papers collection, housed in the
Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, part
of the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives in Madison.
Blitzstein used bits of The Condemned as source material for
later works, but the choral opera as originally conceived
has never been performed. All Blitzstein quotations
are reprinted with the permission of the Kurt Weill
Foundation for Music, New York. All rights reserved.


2 Some European works invite comparison, although
Blitzstein’s choral opera precedes them all. Hanns Eisler
would write the Communist-themed oratorio Die Mutter
in 1935, which features substantial music for chorus, and
concern for the Jewish situation in Germany inspired
Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time (1939-1941), which
would also use choral music to great eff ect.

Ten Keys to Unlocking Artistic Choral Performance (Keys 7-10)

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The October and November 2015 issue of Choral Journal included a two-part article titled “Ten Keys to Unlocking Artistic Choral Performance” by Frank Eychaner. Following are short excerpts from Keys 7-10. You can read it in its entirety online at acda.org/choraljournal. Click “Search Archives” and choose October 2015 (part 1) or November 2015 (part 2) from the dropdown menu.
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The gap between an uninspired reading of the notes on the page and an artful performance is monumental. The following ten keys can help us bridge that gap, “unlocking” the expressive powers of our singers through the music we make with them. These “keys,” a compilation of the best practices of some of the finest minds in the music world, have served me well in my quest for choral artistry, and it is my hope they can serve you.

Key 7: Movement and Artistry in Sound

A variety of movement exercises can powerfully impact the artistry of a choral performance, and the applications of movement in the choral rehearsal are nearly endless. Much of vocal technique can be aided through the liberal use of movement in the rehearsal, both ours and our singers’. Our gestural choices are limited only by our imagination and our artistic aims. As the work of Rodney Eichenberger reveals, what our singers see is what we get. Allowing the unspoken laws of nonverbal communication to inform our conducting will immediately improve the ensemble’s unity, tonal flexibility, and our ability to clearly communicate our artistic intent.

Key 8: Phrase Shapes and Song Architecture

Artistry is often seen in the gestalt of a performance. While a choir can sing an individual chord beautifully, this does not ensure that a succession of chords performed beautifully will lead to an artistically beautiful performance. Artistry is the victim when we become enamored with the vertical sound of a chord at the expense of musical line, phrasing, and the structure of the entire composition.

Key 9: Nurturing the Artist in You

We cannot effectively lead the ensemble to artistic vistas we have not visited: we must develop our own artistry. Discover and grow your own artistry by being an artist! Perform as a soloist; join an exceptional community or church choir or audition for a role in a musical. Develop your own aesthetic sensibilities by becoming more aware and deliberate in your own music making.

Key 10: A Safe Place

Artistic performances are nearly impossible to achieve in an atmosphere of tension, anger, distrust, fear, and hurt. An atmosphere of respect, trust, and safety is prerequisite to creating a place where honesty and emotional risk-taking are the norm; it is the fertile soil from which artistic performances grow. Safeguarding the environment so singers know they are cared about as individuals is a foundation that opens the wellspring of humanity that lives in our singers—humanity that is longing to come out into the light of day.

Frank Eychaner is the director of choral and vocal studies at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. He is active as a clinician, guest conductor, and author.
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Read the rest of this article (and more!) in the October and November 2015 issues of Choral Journal, available online at acda.org.

Ten Keys to Unlocking Artistic Choral Performance (Keys 4-6)

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The October and November 2015 issue of Choral Journal included a two-part article titled “Ten Keys to Unlocking Artistic Choral Performance” by Frank Eychaner. Following are short excerpts from Keys 4-6. You can read it in its entirety online at acda.org/choraljournal. Click “Search Archives” and choose October 2015 (part 1) or November 2015 (part 2) from the dropdown menu.
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The gap between an uninspired reading of the notes on the page and an artful performance is monumental. The following ten keys can help us bridge that gap, “unlocking” the expressive powers of our singers through the music we make with them. These “keys,” a compilation of the best practices of some of the finest minds in the music world, have served me well in my quest for choral artistry, and it is my hope they can serve you.

Key 4: Melody

No two consecutive melodic notes have the same importance. Artistry is vastly improved when we draw appropriate attention to the first, last, highest, lowest, and longest note of the melody—notes that usually occur with significant words and accented syllables. Melodic lines move ahead (often concurrently with an ascending line) to a musical high point, then decay until there is a release, a pause to gather energy, and a restless moving ahead again in the next phrase. How do we draw attention to these melodic events? We should make them substantively different from the notes around them with subtle (and sometimes overt) changes to articulation, dynamics, stress, tone, and even tempo.

Key 5: Conducting and Artistry

Develop your conducting facility like your life depends on it, because your musical artistry certainly does. Why use a hundred words to describe away a poor conducting gesture when you can develop gestures that clearly and consistently communicate the composer’s intent to any musician? We are choral conductors after all! Our gesture can become our greatest tool or remain an artistic liability. Adapt traditional patterns to appropriately communicate the choices made in Keys 1-4.

Key 6: Tone Color: Authenticity and Honesty

The vocal tone that is appropriate for a choral work should always be informed and guided by the historical and cultural context that gave birth to the work. In educational ensembles, this ideal is often balanced by the developmental limitations of the singers with whom we are working.

Additionally, Howard Swan noted that all conductors have sounds they prefer from their singers, sounds they intentionally evoke with their conducting and teaching. Despite these limitations, we must work deliberately, via warm-ups, study of style and performing quality literature from a variety of traditions, to increase the ability of the ensemble to perform with appropriately varied vocal timbres that manifest the composer’s ideals represented in the scores we perform.

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Read the rest of this article (and more!) in the October and November 2015 issues of Choral Journal, available online at acda.org.

Ten Keys to Unlocking Artistic Choral Performance (Keys 1-3)

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The October and November 2015 issue of Choral Journal included a two-part article titled “Ten Keys to Unlocking Artistic Choral Performance” by Frank Eychaner. Following are short excerpts from Keys 1-3. You can read it in its entirety online at acda.org/choraljournal. Click “Search Archives” and choose October 2015 (part 1) or November 2015 (part 2) from the dropdown menu.
_____________________________

The gap between an uninspired reading of the notes on the page and an artful performance is monumental. The following ten keys can help us bridge that gap, “unlocking” the expressive powers of our singers through the music we make with them. These “keys,” a compilation of the best practices of some of the finest minds in the music world, have served me well in my quest for choral artistry, and it is my hope they can serve you.

Key 1: Text

The text of a musical selection presents challenges in two areas: the message and the delivery. The first challenge is addressed as we consider repertoire… Once repertoire has been chosen, we address how that text is delivered.

Key 2: Note Groupings

Not every note in a musical phrase is of equal importance. Like words forming a sentence, notes in a phrase are part of musical sentences in which some are nouns and verbs (more important) and others are adjectives, conjunctions, and adverbs (of lesser importance although belonging to the more important notes).

Key 3: Dynamics and Articulation

The dynamics of a work must be considered many levels. Within each note of a pulse or longer, there is growth or decay, organic movement from soft to loud and/or loud to soft. Dotted notes and tied notes almost invariably grow through the dot. At cadences, non-harmonics are more prominent than their resolutions. Phrases have direction that is sometimes indicated in a written dynamic but more often is not indicated explicitly: ascending lines frequently build to a musical or textual climax, and descents decay to a sensitive release. Don’t neglect the implied dynamics. Go somewhere with the line!

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Read the rest of this article (and more!) in the October and November 2015 issues of Choral Journal, available online at acda.org.

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