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ChorTeach Preview

Spring 2021 ChorTeach Preview

May 3, 2021 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

ChorTeach is ACDA’s quarterly online publication, designed for those who work with singers of all levels. A full annotated ChorTeach index is available online at acda.org/chorteach. Over 160 articles are organized into seventeen categories. For submission information, to view the index, or to read the latest issue, visit acda.org/chorteach. Following is a list of the articles in the Spring 2021 issue!

Sharing through Song: Resources for Singing Migration Stories by Ethan M. Chessin
Camas High School
Camas, Washington


Addressing Racial and Cultural Challenges in Choirs by Baruch Whitehead
Ithaca College
Ithaca, New York


A Delicate Balance—Caring for the Music and the Singers by J. Dennis Morrissey
Heartland Community College
Normal, Illinois


Preserving the Choral Art in the Time of COVID—“How Can I Keep from Singing?”
David Howard
University of Oklahoma
Norman, Oklahoma

Jeffrey J. Gonda II
DMA Candidate in Choral Conducting, University of Oklahoma
Norman, Oklahoma

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Read or download ChorTeach online at acda.org/publications/chorteach or by clicking here

Filed Under: ChorTeach Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, ChorTeach, ChorTeach Preview

ChorTeach Preview: An Introductory Guide to Creating Virtual Choir Projects

January 18, 2021 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

ChorTeach is ACDA’s quarterly online publication, designed for those who work with singers of all levels. A full annotated ChorTeach index is available online at acda.org/chorteach. Over 160 articles are organized into seventeen categories. For submission information, to view the index, or to read the latest issue, visit acda.org/chorteach. Following is an excerpt from an article in the current Winter issue titled: An Introductory Guide to Creating Virtual Choir Projects by Wen Zhang.

 _____________________

The global pandemic produced an unprecedented shift that elicited resiliency in higher education. Many colleges and universities required the use of remote education, and choral music educators needed to find new solutions to continue choral music instead of face to face instruction.

While many choral music educators have been trying different approaches to create their virtual projects, relying on a wide range of online tutorial videos to solve certain technical issues, finding a big picture, step-by-step guide for the entire creative process from start to finish has been difficult. This article aims to provide effective strategies and practical guidelines to those who wish to know what to do to be able to master the essentials of the virtual choir.

When my university decided to go fully online in mid-March 2020, as a voice professor and coordinator of the Music Department plus serving as director of a local community choir, I realized that I needed to make the best of an unusual situation and remain optimistic that something good might come out of such a difficult time in this country. I had virtually no experience in this technology, but it seemed to be a perfect time to train myself with new technology for creating virtual choir projects. Both the creator (me) and participants (students and friends) learned much during the creation of our three virtual choir projects. One of the proudest outcomes is that the final projects were posted on YouTube and broadcast on local TV channels. This attracted a much wider audience than any live choir concerts ever had at my university. Creating a virtual choir is not an easy task.

Although each of the three virtual choir projects I created was quite different in terms of quality and digital design, I hope that by sharing what I learned from creating these projects, I can provide an introductory guide to other choral music professionals who might want to take on the challenge. I believe this article will help them, accelerate the learning process, and encourage them to attempt the very promising journey of creation from start to finish. Four steps are offered in this article:

  1. Select a choral work and find the performers and the software for completing the project
  2. Create a singing plan containing the requirements for video recording. Provide a guide track (accompaniment track) for making individual videos. Send both to the performers.
  3. Provide guidelines for making video recordings. Include deadlines for submissions.
  4. Edit individual videos. Create a final version and publish it on social media.

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Read more in the Winter 2021 issue of ChorTeach, available at https://acda.org/publications/chorteach/

Filed Under: ChorTeach Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, ChorTeach, ChorTeach Preview, virtual choir

ChorTeach Preview: Healing Our Singers, Healing Ourselves

December 28, 2020 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

ChorTeach is ACDA’s quarterly online publication, designed for those who work with singers of all levels. A full annotated ChorTeach index is available online at acda.org/chorteach. Over 160 articles are organized into seventeen categories. For submission information, to view the index, or to read the latest issue, visit acda.org/chorteach. Following is an excerpt from an article in the current Winter issue titled: Healing Our Singers, Healing Ourselves—Social and Emotional Learning in Choir by Lindsey Blackhurst.

 _____________________

The value of choral singing is not found solely in its aesthetic or educational worth. Singing has been shown to positively impact physical health by improving the cardiovascular system, elevating mood through the production of oxytocin, and increasing the body’s immunological response. Singing with others in a school, community, or faith-based choir generates added benefi ts. In pursuit of a common goal—singing well together—the repeated acts of listening, creating, and experimenting bond choral musicians together, resulting in feelings of closeness, emotional connection, and inclusion. Choral singers have described feeling supported, seen, valued, and loved by others in the ensemble.1

As singers self-identify as members of a particular group, a feeling of belonging emerges. At a fundamental level, choral singing reminds us that we are not alone. Another person hears me and responds to me. But since February and March of this year, our society has been grappling with a reality of social, or physical, distancing in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. Students, educators, singers, and conductors were thrust into new learning environments virtually overnight without knowing when or how we will return to normal.

Some of our students have been removed from a safe and supportive school environment to what may feel like a chaotic and less-supportive home environment. Educators similarly are faced with upturned schedules and new stressors as we strive to remain flexible during this uncertain time. This has been an isolating, lonely experience for many of us. In this period of physical distancing, when mental and emotional health have become a growing concern, the social, emotional, and spiritual solace of group singing is more important than ever.

The global health crisis caused by COVID-19 certainly has amplified the need to attend to our students’ physical and emotional needs. According to The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning’s (CASEL) website, “When physical distancing is deemed necessary, social and emotional connectedness is even more crucial.”2

Social and emotional learning helps people gain skills in five major competencies, as described by CASEL: selfawareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. SEL implements curricula and coursework to help students gain these competencies and must also be integrated by educators into their own lives, individual classrooms, and disciplines.

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NOTES
1 See Bailey, B. A. & Davidson, J. W. (2002). Adaptive characteristics of group singing: Perceptions from members of a choir for homeless men. Musicae Scientiae, 6(2), 221–256; Bailey, B. A., & Davidson, J. W. (2005). Effects of group singing and performance for marginalized and middle-class singers. Psychology of Music, 33(3), 269–303; Creech, A., Hallam, S., McQueen, H., & Varvarigou, M. (2013). The power of music in the lives of older adults. Research Studies in Music Education, 35(1), 87–102; Murray, M. & Lamont, A. (2012). Community music and social/health psychology: linking theoretical and practical concerns. In R. MacDonald, G. Kreutz, & L. Mitchell (Eds.) Music, health and well-being (pp. 76–86). New York, NY: Oxford; and Strayhorn, T. L. (2011). Singing in a foreign land: An exploratory study of gospel choir participation among African American undergraduates at a predominantly White institution. Journal of College Student Development, 52(2), 137–153.

2 Niemi, K. (2020). Covid-resources. Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://casel.org/covid-resources/

Read more in the Winter 2021 issue of ChorTeach, available at https://acda.org/publications/chorteach/

Filed Under: ChorTeach Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, ChorTeach, ChorTeach Preview

Fall 2020 ChorTeach Preview

October 12, 2020 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

ChorTeach is ACDA’s quarterly online publication, designed for those who work with singers of all levels. A full annotated ChorTeach index is available online at acda.org/chorteach. Over 160 articles are organized into seventeen categories. For submission information, to view the index, or to read the latest issue, visit acda.org/chorteach. Following is a list of the articles in the Fall 2020 issue!

Singing Polyphony Today—Why Have All the Flowers Gone? by Jameson Marvin

Critical Thinking in Rehearsals by Gregory LeFils Jr.

Reconsidering the Use of Metaphor in Choral Rehearsals by Brian Winnie

Teaching Healthy Singing in the Choral and Applied Studio
Part One: The Pedagogues’ Teachings
 by Derrick L. Thompson

Teaching Healthy Singing in the Choral and Applied Studio
Part Two: The Students’ Perspective
 by Derrick L. Thompson

Read or download ChorTeach online at acda.org/publications/chorteach or by clicking here

Filed Under: ChorTeach Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, ChorTeach, ChorTeach Preview, Singing, Teaching

Planning Ahead: Five Considerations for Future Choral Music Classrooms

July 27, 2020 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

ChorTeach is ACDA’s quarterly online publication, designed for those who work with singers of all levels. A full annotated ChorTeach index is available online at acda.org/chorteach. Over 160 articles are organized into seventeen categories. For submission information, to view the index, or to read the latest issue, visit acda.org/chorteach. Following is an excerpt from an article in the Summer 2020 issue titled: Planning Ahead: Five Considerations for Future Choral Music Classrooms by Andrew Lusher. A version of this article will also appear in the upcoming September issue of Choral Journal.

__________________________

My school has an unwritten rule: When something goes wrong, take four minutes and fifty-nine seconds to be emotional. Then it’s time to move forward.

I admit that it took me a bit longer, nearly six weeks, to fully grieve the loss of the end of the school year. When the quarantine mandate was issued, my students and I were two days away from premiering a commissioned work from an internationally-known composer, five days before our annual state assessment, and just over a month until our annual musical production. It felt like the house that we had been designing and building together all year had just disappeared.

Seeing the choral music community adjust to our new reality has been interesting for me. Virtual choirs of all types grace social media. Videos of past concerts from amateur, educational, and professional ensembles are continually featured online. Classroom teachers are taking this time to review theory skills, suggest creative projects, and try social activities that encourage reflection on a student’s musical identity. It’s been wonderful seeing the energy and inventiveness with which colleagues have adjusted to the new reality.

But, let’s face it. When you take the human connection out of music making, you have taken the very soul out of the music. Virtual choirs were a fascination for a few weeks, and asynchronous learning provides momentary instruction, but the heart of it all is missing. Without a practical context in which to implement theory skills, vocal warm ups, or emotional refl ections, the value of participating in a choral ensemble diminishes. Our musical life is not going to return to normal in the near future. Now is the time to start planning and preparing for what comes next.

If history is any indication, choral music performing ensembles will adapt and endure. During the Thirty Years War, Heinrich Schütz famously had to compose with depleting resources. On one Sunday, he may have had only two singers on a voice part and a full consort of instruments, whereas the following week he might have had only a baritone, a soprano, a viol, and a small organ. Yet, due to his resourcefulness and ingenuity, we are left with some of the most fl exible, dramatic, and beautiful choral music ever composed.

Likewise, the descants that sopranos love belting out in church on Sundays were the result of what happened to men during World War II. The number of available men was so reduced in the average church choir that the men and lower voices sang the melody of the tune while the upper voices were given a special part, the descant. It was a way of coping with the strain on the church choir from the ravages of war. Now we can’t imagine Christmas or Easter without men. Choral music making will endure, but it will require creativity to maintain the integrity of our unique musical experience.

You can read more in the Summer 2020 issue of ChorTeach. A summary of the other articles in this issue can be found here: https://choralnet.org/2020/06/summer-2020-chorteach-preview/

Filed Under: ChorTeach Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, ChorTeach, ChorTeach Preview, COVID-19, Teaching

Summer 2019 ChorTeach Preview

July 29, 2019 by Amanda Bumgarner Leave a Comment

ChorTeach is ACDA’s quarterly online publication, designed for those who work with singers of all levels. A full annotated ChorTeach index is available online at acda.org/chorteach. Over 160 articles are organized into seventeen categories. For submission information, to view the index, or to read the latest issue, visit acda.org/chorteach.

Volume 11, Issue 4, is now available online and contains the following four articles:

Singing Seniors
Nicole Aldrich, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

“Older adults can bring a wealth of experience, wisdom, and grace to our ensembles. Along with these, they bring their older bodies and voices. And while the older adult voice is not the same instrument as the one the singer enjoyed in her or his younger years, it is simply not true that older adults should accept the voice changes as inevitable. Choral directors can do much to keep their “chronologically gifted” singers performing at a high level for years.

“Choir directors typically are most aware of the physical changes that singers undergo as they age because these changes have effects that we can hear in rehearsal: loss of vocal range, change in vibrato rate or size, loss of breath control, decreased endurance, pitch inaccuracies, breathiness, and changes in loudness, etc. Some of these physical changes include muscle wasting and related changes in balance, posture, and coordination, reduced vital capacity in the lungs, and stiffening, thinning and deterioration of the vocal folds which can cause the vocal folds to bow. Bowed vocal folds do not close as strongly. This can lead to breathiness, hoarseness, and vocal strain. Hearing loss, side effects from medications, and other health problems are also factors for some older adults.”

The Concert Spiritual—It is Closer to Western Classical Music than You Might Think
M. Roger Holland, University of Denver

“Most of us are aware of the origins of the Negro Spiritual. This folk music emerged in the crucible of American slavery when Africans were brought to the Americas in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and labored under the harshest of circumstances. Infusing elements of their African culture along with Bible stories they learned from Christian missionaries, they sang about their present plight and desire for freedom. These “sorrow songs,” later called spirituals, became a huge part of what sustained the enslaved African community, gave them a sense of hope, and affirmed their humanity. The Negro Spiritual (or spiritual) is what musician and scholar Wendell Whalum refers to as the root and trunk of Black music.1

“After emancipation, many freed blacks wanted nothing to do with anything that was reminiscent of slavery and sought to divorce themselves of any vestiges of this terrible history, including the singing of spirituals, seeing this music as unsophisticated and an indication that one was uneducated.2 This mind-set no doubt contributed to the reluctance of the students at the Fisk Free Colored School (now Fisk University) to sing spirituals as they toured to raise money to support their school. Eventually, a small group of classically trained singers known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers embraced this folk music of their heritage and enthralled audiences worldwide.”

1 Wendell Phillips Whalum, “Black Hymnody,” Review & Expositor 70, no. 3 (Summer 1973): 353.
2 James Weldon Johnson. The Books of American Negro Spirituals. Vol. 1. (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc. 1989), 49.

Getting Inside the Mind of the Composer
Carl Ashley, First Baptist Church, Goldsboro, North Carolina

“Have you ever stopped to think about why composers compose? Many, if not most, of the great composers agree that composition cannot really be taught. Stravinsky once said, “A composer is or isn’t; he cannot learn to acquire the gift that makes him one… The composer will know that he is one if composition creates exact appetites in him, and if in satisfying them he is aware of their exact limits. Similarly, he will know he is not one if he has only a desire to compose or [a] wish to express himself in music.” (Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, by Robert Craft, n.p.)

“It is the performer’s responsibility to strive to recreate the composer’s intent. Composition is a form of artistic expression, just as performance is. If we do not fully understand the composer’s thoughts, we cannot fully understand his or her creation. One contemporary arranger once noted that she could only write down about ten percent of what was in her head. Because of this, some people claim that approaching a work from the perspective of the composer is impossible, since we can only have limited knowledge of the instrumentation, acoustics, or traditions of performance. In addition, our audience may come from a different background and culture, and not relying on the composer’s view gives the performer freedom. On the other hand, how can the music be truly appreciated unless it is performed as intended?”

The Missing Link: An Intermediate Step for Introducing New Music to Your Choir
Bo Shirah, McAllen High School, McAllen, Texas
Micah Bland, DMA Student, University of Southern California

“Since the time of early American singing masters who traveled from town to town selling their music books and teaching the public how to read music using a sol-fa system, the process of introducing and learning a choral work has seemed to remain relatively unchanged. Currently, two main approaches seem to dominate the secondary American educational system. The first being rote teaching, in which the teacher plays or sings the notes, with the students echoing until the content is learned. The second being a sight-reading method incorporating alternative syllables which represent a correlating pitch, such as solfege or numbers.

“It is in this second method that many educators approach the music learning process in a ritualistic fashion where students first count the rhythms, chant the solfege syllables in rhythm, and finally sing the syllables in rhythm. While this method is effective and utilized by many educators, there remains a missing step in this sequence of music teaching.”

Filed Under: ChorTeach Tagged With: ACDA Membership Benefits, ACDA Publications, ChorTeach, ChorTeach Preview

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