One of my favorite choir tricks was to telling my singers to ‘aim for the top side of the pitch.’  This was, of course, because they were singing flat, and I thought the imagery would give my singers a way of thinking about an abstract concept (singing in tune) in a simplified, easily understood, silver bullet fashion.  In rea... read more

Having been a director, I acknowledge that through the years I have fallen prey to using cheap techniques – “tricks” that skirted around the issues of posture, tone production, breathing, vowel formation, physical awareness, and aural skills. These were temporary patches over a myriad of problems plaguing the ensembles b... read more

One Sunday, I was subbing in a choir in Mississippi.  On that particular Sunday, the church in question was auditioning a candidate to be their next Music Director. He worked us a little bit, then said the following, in the laziest South Mississippi Drawl you can imagine, “Now, when you look at me, you see country, you hear country, you ... read more

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that “music is math.” Whether in relation to something simple (counting), or something more esoteric (highly-developed, academic analyses of harmony and structure), or whether it is a misguided argument to try to convince school boards that studying music will help kids excel a... read more

I brought this question up before as one of the fundamental problems of working with, and being a part of, a choral ensemble. After all, no one really wants to listen to an out-of-tune choir.   It’s a complicated issue that involves both technical and conceptual components.  Everyone’s heard a bit about the technic... read more

I am an auditory learner. Rather than reading instructions, doing something manually, or watching someone do something, I need to incorporate information through my ears and process it with my listening in order for it to be fully engrained.  You can imagine, then, what frustration I felt as a young player, relying on my eyes to determine what... read more