July 2008

After watching Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, I realized that I want to write vocal counterpoint. For whatever reason polyphonic vocals excite me more than just about anything, and is I think the main reason I’m falling more and more in love with renaissance madrigals and medieval motets. Hearing the first song in the second act [...]

This week’s vocalize is essentially a cadenza. It sounds like the end of a little piano exercise, and has nice little three note sections that can be used to practice different techniques. It’s also fairly long so breath control can be examined too. Check it out: vocalize10 Here are a few ideas for how you [...]

This week’s vocalize is fairly straightforward. The purpose of it is to get your choir used to singing non major scales and arpeggios during the warm-up session, and, again, to work on resonance. Here we go: vocalize9 Raising the penultimate note (in this case the 4th) is a fairly common occurrence, so it’s good for [...]

As a choir director, you’re in position of high visibility. At the very least you can expect that each choir member knows who you are and has made some judgment about you. It’s not like worrying about what other people think of the clothes you’re wearing or how clean your house is. In those cases [...]

Here’s a vocalize I learned from singing in the Arbor consort. It uses the arpeggio in an interesting way to work on connecting notes separated by a considerable distance (a fourth) and singing staccato down an arpeggio. vocalize8 The tendency will be for singers to accent or “punch” the upper c effectively disconnecting it from [...]

When I started directing the Collegium last fall, I was taking over an already established choir, a very different task than starting a choir from scratch. It has it’s own perks (don’t have to do much recruiting) and pitfalls (high expectations), but it’s not the same thing as starting a new choir from nothing. I’ve [...]