Choir Directing

The easiest, most intuitive way to have a focused choir rehearsal is to know what you’re going to be singing in advance. In this post I’ll go into some detail about how I plan my rehearsals. Before the new quarter starts I determine which songs from our current overall repertoire we’ll be singing and enter [...]

Here’s a simple vocalize designed to help your choir concentrate on proper breathing. Have them breathe in using their diaphragm and let out the air on an “s”. Exhaling on “s” slows down the rate of expiration enable your choir to experience just how long they can hold a note, and it gives the singers [...]

This week’s vocalize is the entire melisma including last week’s vocalize at the very end of it. midi This exercise is all about breath control. The tempo of the midi is somewhat on the slow side, which may be a bit much to start with. My suggestion is to start faster singing either on Mi [...]

Starting today every Monday I’m going to post a new vocalize that you can work on with your choir after you’ve done some warm ups. The goal with these vocalizes is to train your choir to be able to execute difficult passages with ease. The primary focus of the “Now Wolde Y Fayne” series of [...]

I just added a Music Editions section to the site. As of right now, all the music is stuff the Collegium uses. It’s all in the public domain, so you can do whatever you want with it as long as you don’t try to sell it as your own. Enjoy!

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that a choir which comes prepared for rehearsal will perform a lot better than one who doesn’t. It also shouldn’t be surprising that enabling the choir to prepare at home isn’t necessarily a straightforward task. If you aren’t able to play an instrument you pretty much don’t have [...]

Getting your choir to sing songs in foreign languages can be challenging especially when your choir mostly consists of hobbyists. Your choir came to sing, not to speak Latin. Yet singing a repertoire of only English songs is limiting and if you’re directing an early music group, even English pronunciation won’t necessarily be straightforward. Old [...]

The Collegium is a repertoire group, meaning that we maintain a large number of songs. Unlike school choirs we don’t do a music changeover every semester or Church choirs who have changeover every week or season. In fact we never do a complete changeover. Some songs the group has sung for a decade. Others we [...]

Chances are high that if you’re leading a small madrigal group you’ll also be singing in it. Conducting and singing are complicated tasks alone let alone doing them simultaneously, so what are you supposed to do? There are a few things to consider when you’re getting started. First, don’t expect everything to run smoothly the [...]