arrange • compose • conduct
Posts specifically about choral music
Ask the choir to get aggressive with their releases. Rhythmically accurate entrances are much more easily attainable than accurate releases. Young singers just seem to want to…arbitrarily stop the sound at the approximately correct spot. Particularly in rhythmically active music, and particularly when you can’t add a shadow vowel (say, […]
The first time I bake or cook a new recipe, I try to follow it to the letter. No substitutions, no tweaks, no “I think it’ll taste better if…”. That’s because I don’t know yet what’s integral and what’s flexible. After I’ve made it at least once, a recipe is […]
There are two kinds of board games I love to play. The first has complex and subtle rules: they are difficult to learn, at first (your first round might feel like riding a roller coaster blindfolded, trying to understand what’s happening) but when you’ve mastered the gameplay, there are all […]
I think the best learning happens when you have enough time to have fun. Sometimes, in the crunch of the moment, I have to move with peak efficiency. In the recording studio or in the rehearsal process, I am leaving no moment unused. It’s effective but it isn’t very fun. […]
Leadership in an ensemble can take many forms, ranging by degrees from a detail oriented clockmaker, who finely tunes and controls every moment of performance, and an ensemble member who does a count off to start the performance and then fades back into the ensemble. The range does not include […]
I left our choir concert last night so inspired by my colleagues, Mandy Mikita Scott and Melanie Dorn Kraut, and the amazing students we all work with. They took time in the last couple of weeks to reinterpret the Oxford High School Fight Song as a heartfelt statement of solidarity […]
How long do you need to wear a new pair of shoes before they feel worn in? A week? Longer? There’s a process of the shoe adjusting to conform to your feet, and your feet getting to know the shoes. It takes time, and it’s pretty much unavoidable. There’s the […]
Yesterday, I wrote about how much music benefits from percolation, especially in the form of multiple performances. Why not, then, program less music? I tend to program between 15 and 20 pieces of music for my ensembles each year. Why not cut that to 10 or even 8, and repeated […]
Music requires percolation time to achieve the best results. Think about the number of pieces a high school, college, or community choir might perform only once before putting away. It’s a significant percentage, and that’s too bad, because the percolation works better in performance than in rehearsal. Every performance you […]
When I look at the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas Break, I shudder, then cheerfully tie up my running shoes. I have for years. It’s a mad dash – all the normal things a person does in this time, but, like all musicians, also in one of the busiest months […]