Uncategorized

Choir directors celebrate Thanksgiving a few weeks early in Michigan. (And not because we’ve already all started Christmas music…) Looking around the ACDA-Michigan Fall Conference for the past two days, I saw family. As I told several people, I would feel perfectly comfortable sharing Thanksgiving with three-quarters of the people at […]

Yesterday the Rockford High School Advanced Women’s Ensemble (Mandy Mikita Scott, conductor) shared a remarkable program at the ACDA-Michigan Fall Conference. Their program, titled “Be The Change” empowered the students in the choir to express their own emotional reality, and I felt a powerful positive energy in the room in reaction. […]

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act,–act in the living Present! Heart within, and God o’erhead! I’ve written before about my love for Longfellow’s Psalm of Life, but the third line of this stanza is speaking to me today. All we can do in a […]

In a society that constantly enables people to deaden or ignore their emotions, one of the most important lessons a choir can offer is emotional honesty. The other day I saw a choir member leave rehearsal in tears in the middle of singing a charged piece. Singing the powerful text and stirring melody required her […]

Note: this is the fifth of a series of posts investigating the leadership style of John Wooden and its applicability to choral music education. John Wooden’s final block in the base of his Pyramid of Success is COOPERATION. Wooden says, “Much can be accomplished when no one cares about who gets the credit.” And: “Make sure the people […]

App designers understand how fundamental is our desire to maintain streaks. One of the fundamental Snapchat features keeps track of streaks of consecutive snaps between friends. Duolingo tries to gamify language learning in part by rewarding streaks. Besides having a social component, one of the most important features to build into […]

This election season must be particularly stressful for high school students. They will be profoundly affected by outcome on November 8, but they are mostly be unable to make their voice heard. It’s an opportunity for choral educators to provide them with a place to make their voice heard. No political voice, no partisan […]

We want to prioritize everything, but that’s really the same as prioritizing nothing. I love writing–it’s how I stay grounded and connected. It’s how I express my creative soul. But I love my family more. When it comes down to it, I have learned to fit my creative work around my […]

This video uses some clever animation to describe the challenges of a cappella just intonation. I particularly like the way they use a honeycomb to visualize rows of just-tuned fifths, with each row being a syntonic comma higher or lower. I frequently give a brief demonstration of tuning using a piano fifth […]

In Greek Mythology, Pandora was the first human. Her fatal flaw was curiosity. When she unsealed “Pandora’s Box” she released all pain and disease into the world. You ever have one of those days? Years? But the best was last. Having released anguish into the world, one thing remained at the bottom of her vessel […]