arrange • compose • conduct
Posts specifically about choral music
The only way to memorize anything is repetition. (I generally repeat this until my students memorize it.) So, as I said to my students today, get your reps in! If you know it’s going to take a certain amount of repetitions to get to memorized, there can be no good […]
I’ve begun incorporating a solo project into my winter semester with Shades of Blue. It’s a good opportunity to explore beyond ensemble singing, and a new experience for most of my students, who don’t get other opportunities to sing jazz in an authentic solo way. Step 1 is for each […]
Hard pieces take time, and every minute student singers spend not knowing the piece is a minute they spend forming judgement on the piece. This can be perilous. We all form judgements before we really understand pieces, and if a strong negative opinion is formed simply because the piece is […]
One of the best ways to find new repertoire is one that didn’t exist not too long ago. I love to see the programs posted online by the colleagues I most respect. The repertoire they’re programming is, by definition, the repertoire I want to program, and while not everything they […]
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 […]