ChoralNet member Steven Szalaj sent me the following note:
I was really touched by the story, and the demonstration of the power we as conductors and educators in our lives. i look for writing by folks not professionally in "the music dodge" who articulate music's importance in their life. Though this is not specific to choral music, the sentiment applies. The end of the piece identifies the writer's profession.
Mr. K. pushed us harder than our parents, harder than our other teachers, and through sheer force of will made us better than we had any right to be. He scared the daylight out of us.
I doubt any of us realized how much we loved him for it.
Which is why, decades later, I was frantically searching for an instrument whose case still bore the address of my college dorm. After almost a half-century of teaching, at the age of 81, Mr. K. had died of Parkinson’s disease. And across the generations, through Facebook and e-mail messages and Web sites, came the call: it was time for one last concert for Mr. K. — performed by us, his old students and friends.
Very often, in the session the week before, or even sometimes in the rehearsal on the day of the concert, it appears that everyone in the choir has forgotten what songs they know, which parts they sing, and what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s as if some group amnesia has spread like a virus, as well as knocking the energy out of everyone.
Directing the choir in these situations is like climbing uphill through mud and always makes me despair, even though I know it’s just part of the process and everything will (probably) be all right on the night.
But that doesn’t stop me from despairing and wishing that I was somewhere else and really worrying if we’re ever going to pull the concert off. In fact, I even worry if people are ever going to remember how to sing again at all!
Then the concert arrives and (usually) everything goes swimmingly and we all forget the awful rehearsal the week before.
Afterwards, on a high and like a dog with a short memory, we start looking forward to the next concert and hope that everything will go smoothly, until that is, we get to the dreaded rehearsal the week before and it all happens again.
Then we remember: “Ah, yes, this is what happened last time”. But there is nothing we can do, and we despair again and we plod on again and we pray that it will all turn out fine. And it usually does.
Going to conventions are always refreshing for me. I learn, I hear, I get ideas-it's great. I just came back from the ACDA Western Division Conference and had a blast!
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There were some great memories made this week, and I gained a lot of advice/wisdom/introspection about this career and my game plan. Don't get me wrong, there were lots of "receptions" and "teacher therapies" too :) If I learned anything this conference it is: This line of work is grueling, hard and emotionally draining, but with supportive friends who believe in you and God's wisdom and guidance, it can be done (and with a little passion and understanding, it can be done well). I'm ready for the future.
I'm preparing a concert of all misattributed works for my next program, and it's been lots of fun. There are so many pieces to choose from! The BWV is full of bogus Bach works, and unscrupulous publishers in the 18th and 19th centuries claimed that all kinds of stuff was by Mozart, Pergolesi, etc., so it would sell better. Well-known fakes like "Mon coeur se recommande à vous" as well as PDQ Bach are in the program too. I got the inspiration last year after we sang a not-really-by-Buxtehude Magnificat, which we always referred to as the "pseudo-Buxtehude."
It's been amazingly liberating to work on this music. A bass raises his hand and asks if that note should be a G-sharp rather than a G. Or the sopranos find the text underlay awkward and wonder if they can adjust it. The current orthodoxy is to treat composers as gods, so all questions like that always come down to determining the composer's intent. What would Mozart have wanted? we ask, ignoring the question of what Mozart's (or our) audience would want. The composer's score is treated as holy writ, and any deviation treated as blasphemy.
With this bogus music, the will of the composer can be freely ignored. Who cares what Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin (the composer of "Mon coeur") wanted? He's not even a demi-god. Who knows what loser wrote Bach's supposed St. Luke Passion? Whoever he was, he's a pretender to divinity. At last, I can make decisions based on what will make the most sense to the audience, without worrying about the high priests of Historically Informed Performance breathing down my neck.
I like to think I went into music because I had some musical sense and good musical instincts, and I trust my instincts when making musical decisions. It always galls me to have some hierarch of authenticity tell me I'm violating the basic spirit of music when I'm determining what's best for my audience. The cult of the composer is widespread in our era, and I think it's led to a generation of conductors and performers whose highest aspiration is to be technicians, not musicians.
This month the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, my choral alma mater, will present a concert that epitomizes the kind of music making that went on in Philadelphia when I was a student there in the 1980’s. The occasion is the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Joseph Castaldo’s extraordinary work for narrator, chorus and orchestra Ancient Liturgy, which was originally commissioned and premiered by the Music Group of Philadelphia under Seán Deibler, who also happened to be Choral Arts’ founding Artistic Director.
As previously mentioned here, Joseph Castaldo was my undergraduate composition teacher for four years. He and Seán Deibler were both tremendous personal and musical influences on me. As I also mentioned here in the past, Seán passed away last year, and this Choral Arts concert is being presented in his memory.
Composers often complain that choirs don't perform enough new works. Here's a choir dedicated to only doing new works by Connecticut composers. Composers pay a fee for a fixed amount of rehearsal time with paid singers. They make a recording and a public performance.
Maybe it's not the wave of the future, but it's an interesting idea for composers who want more exposure (and decent recordings of their works to submit to publishers).
We brainstomed ideas for the future for ChoralNet and ACDA - what might be possible - what might be dreamed - and how we might accomplish it.
I wondered - where would you like to see ChoralNet and ACDA head in the next few years? What is possible? What might you do with this space and our collaborative efforts as a community?
Gloria Y. Gadsden, an associate professor of sociology at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, was escorted off the campus on Wednesday because of jokes she had made on her Facebook page about wanting to kill students.
On Monday the professor posted this update: "Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ..." In another comment, on January 21, she wrote: "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman, it's been that kind of day."
But it may not be that simple:
However, Ms. Gadsden said she believes her suspension stems from a racial-harassment complaint she filed with the university last month and from an op-ed article she wrote for The Chronicle in 2008 about the challenges of being a black faculty member.
And a little later:
After her opinion piece was published in The Chronicle, she said she faced disapproval of it on the campus. She said her life was made difficult by administrators, and she encountered so much hostility from one colleague that she filed a racial-harassment complaint with the university last month.
Now I know this isn't about choral music, but it is about teaching and technology. We talk about that alot here!
A story in The Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye the other day about copyright. It discusses lessons from the history of book publishing, the evolution of copyright and what might happen in the future. It has some fascinating history - a few excerpts:
Nothing is sacred about intellectual property:
But he believes that today's information revolution may be even more disruptive than the one Gutenberg set off with his printing press. If we listen to those pirates of old, we'll learn that there is nothing sacred or natural about our basic ideas of intellectual property, he argues, characterizing those notions as imperfect conventions formed in and by the Industrial Revolution. In fact, he suggests, it may be time to cast our models of patents and copyright overboard.
Someone call the "Pirate King" was heavily involved in music publishing:
The pirate king's argument: The country was experiencing a piano boom at the time, so a lot more families needed sheet music. But the major publishers catered to clientele who could pay 18 pence per song, while Willetts charged just two pence. Because the rightful owners had no hope of selling to the new audiences at those prices, Willetts testified, he did no harm to their businesses with his efforts—while bringing high culture and educational benefits to all. "Indeed, piracy might even increase the sales of the legitimate publishers, since it amounted to free advertising," Johns writes, summarizing the pirate's logic.
A projection of where we go next:
"There's a deepening realization that the conceptual framework of intellectual property, which was defined in the Industrial Revolution, no longer fits with how we go around with our daily lives," he says. "The system of authorship that's existed in knowledge creation, in the sciences at least, seems to be in the process of being replaced by something that's much more like a system of flow than one of stasis."
Broadtexter is primarily used by bands as a way of communicating with their fans. There is no reason a choir director can't use it to communicate with her students!
Liz's blog provides a list of tips to minimize choir's performance anxiety. My favorite is this:
If your normal rehearsal warm-ups are about getting people up and going after work, you’ll find that using them just before a performance produces a completely over-hyped choir poised to sing sharp and rush tempi. Meditative warm-ups that slow and deepen the breathing and open the ears are much more useful in these circumstances.
...unless, of course, your performance is on a Friday night after work.
Both these pieces demonstrated how well Sharp has taken over the chorus, and how well the chorus has responded to his direction. The sound of the chorus — aided by the superb acoustics of the cathedral that Sharp himself applauded twice during the evening — was full and rich, the parts well delineated (the chorus seems to have added some forceful bass voices).
For the many stroke victims devastated by the loss of their ability to speak, music may hold the key to unlocking language, according to a new study.
In the study, patients who were taught to essentially sing their words improved their verbal abilities and maintained the improvement for up to a month after the end of the therapy, according to Gottfried Schlaug, a neurology professor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School.
The patients may continue to speak in a more "sing-songy" way than a person with normal speech, but they are able to say functional phrases, such as that they are thirsty or where they live, according to Dr. Schlaug, whose work was met with enthusiastic applause after his presentation.
The research, presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here Saturday, produced often dramatic results in 12 patients whose speech was impaired after a stroke to the left hemisphere of the brain. Such patients struggle to communicate or cannot speak at all.
Angie Johnson guest blogs on composer Paul Carey's website about the recent ACDA Children's Choir Conductors Retreat in Cincinnati. You don't want to miss the next one!
Usually, I am happy to walk away from a conference with a few new techniques, pieces or ideas and this conference did not disappoint us. In fact, it surpassed any conference that I have ever attended in the past. Each session contained inspiring, useful information or ideas that directly pertain to what we do in the real world. From a wonderful team building session full of new ideas to build community within your choir (Angela Broeker) to great sessions on introducing repertoire (Ruth Dwyer) and incorporating sight singing (Sandra Matthias); there was plenty to take home to think about. It was wonderful to see many directors introduce newer “gem pieces” or “War horse” pieces – all wonderful literature.
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I'm preparing a 
Composers often complain that choirs don't perform enough new works. 
Jeffrey Tucker describes his first experience hearing 
