Choir Fam Podcast

"For years, I felt that there was no connection with my hands and the sound. My perception of conducting at the time was that everything needs to be free and relaxed, no tension - and no tension when you sing. There has to be tension when you sing and conduct, because if there's no tension in the body, you're basically bones and skin on the ground. It's a matter of where the te...

“We really wanted our choirs to be more embedded in the community. When I moved to Syracuse, I thought, ‘what does that mean for me?’ There are a lot of teachers out there who are just itching for a professional or pre-professional experience. They’ve been teaching notes all day. You know they want to come and sing, do something meaningful for their community.” Dr. Wendy K. Moy is a conductor, sop...

“I really care a lot about what the student wants to get out of our time together: finding a nice, healthy, balanced phonation that they identify with, that they feel is their true sound, not something I’m forcing them to sound like. More than anything I want my students to feel confident and empowered in making their own voice sound out loud. I just want people to feel joyful and confident partic...

“I shortlisted it to about 10 or 11 poems. I printed them all out on big pieces of paper, and I did visual sketches of what the piece might look like. I would lay them out on the ground, mix them around, and play with what kind of arc it would look like. I’d decide which texts would be the big, climactic moments in the piece, and once I have those two or three big moments, I look at what kind of v...

“There’s three things we have in music: the choir, the rehearsals, and the concerts. We put the people first, not the product. There’s a lot of coaches who have this collateral damage thing about winning, and we choral directors have this collateral damage thing about getting a superior rating. It just doesn’t work that way. I put the kids first, and it’s amazing how my rehearsals changed.” Dr. J....

“There’s still so much we can say through choral music, and a good portion of the music that gets put on the concert stage revolves around similar themes that are timeless, that humans are always wrestling with. At the same time, life moves on, and I think choral music in the last couple years has been a really important response to where we are as a society. An artist’s impetus is to respond to e...

“Nobody really teaches you how to write for the voice because every voice is different. We’re given these standard ranges, which is fine for harmony exercises that aren’t meant to be sung. The information we have guiding us is half-knowledge that’s more dangerous than nothing at all. It’s a question of ‘how can you empathize with the singer?’ As a composer, I work with them to create a composite w...

“If you give attention to the right behaviors, they will multiply. If they sing well and supported and you encourage that, that is going to multiply. If you give attention to the bad behaviors – and that doesn't just mean behavior things like talking out of turn – even though it's being criticized, because it gets attention it will multiply . This is true in life. Whatever you think is p...

"I have to say that the best experience was to conduct choirs on many levels, with amateurs who loved what they did, it was a pleasure working with them just because of that, and also working with higher-level groups and being able to do other things. I started teaching children from 6 years old up to 20. I had non-auditioned groups and more advanced students. That for me was my best teaching...

“I didn’t want conducting to be only about telling people what to do and they respond. I’ve been in situations like that, and it’s sometimes very effective, but it wasn’t something that I felt I could ever do naturally. I can bring my full artistry to something even when everyone else in the room is attempting to bring their full artistry. We get their imaginations and their color spectrum. If the...

Thank you for listening to our show this season!! Here are the favorite choral pieces from our guests in the sixth season: Christ lag in Todesbanden by Johann Sebastian Bach Agnus Dei - Samuel Barber Missa Solemnis - Ludwig van Beethoven Chichester Psalms - Leonard Bernstein Ein Deutsches Requiem - Johannes Brahms Os Justi - Anton Bruckner A Jubilant Song - Norman Dello-Joio Requiem - Maurice Duru...

“It’s not until you’re leading an ensemble that you really figure out how to make the music happen and how to motivate the people around you. It’s humbling in a lot of ways, and it’s so gratifying. As a conductor, you’re providing the framework for musicians to do their best work. Both in the way that you structure rehearsal and the gestures that you are showing the music through, you’re creating...

“This is a way to understand how the voice operates in all its parts – perceptually, physiologically, and acoustically -- so that we can learn to stop doing things that are unnecessary for a particular outcome. A lot of people get worried when they hear anything talking about muscles or working the voice or effort, that we’re talking about doing it all all the time. Why do we do what we do in this...

“One of my favorite parts of teaching younger students is getting to see them experience things for the first time. I was their introduction to choir a lot of the time, their first choir teacher. I got to see them have those moments like, ‘Whoa, we can do this, we can sing together, we can sound really cool.’ Eventually, they can tell you, ‘we were not singing with tall vowels right there.’ They c...

“What most people want to get out of choir is to feel a progression, that they slowly master the craft of choral music. For every warm-up, I boil it down to make it simple but also find the sweet spot where I can challenge the singers to get out of their comfort zone or dare to fail. The bravery to fail is crucial to the music making we’ll be doing after the warm-up. Exercises that are on the brin...

“In many choirs, the tenors and basses were a minority. The tenors and basses at the middle level are disparate; they’re not like each other in any way. Sometimes there’s a common range of only about a minor third. I made it my goal to see if I could write music for that type of choir. Rule #1: the tenors and basses will have separate parts, and it will be in their range. I thought, ‘why not put a...

“There were a whole bunch of these women who were publishing music during their liftetime in 17th-century Italy. I find it's important that young women know that they were composers other than Hildegard and Fanny Hensel who were writing. These women's voices were buried for so many years, and yet they were writing in the same styles as their male contemporaries. We can learn about our ti...

“I remember when I performed at Carnegie Hall for the first time. It was transformative. I remember taking the stage and just being in complete awe. I looked out, and it was just incredible. When I heard the sound, it was even more incredible. I used to say that my favorite part of my job was standing right at the stage door and watching every choir singer come and take the stage for the first tim...

"Every single workshop I give is all about excellence, singing well, singing properly, and achieving the very best we can achieve. Why do we it? We don't do it because we'll be paid millions and millions of pounds. It's not cash-motivated. We do it because there is a higher purpose, a higher calling that makes us do it. I got offered a graduate scheme at university, so I could...

“Burnout is when you reach a point where there is no mystery in the music making anymore and you’re just redoing what you’ve always done. You’re reheating it. Self-exploration should be the goal of every musician. The idea of staying connected to sound through listening and really fantasizing is essential. You have to believe there’s magic in the room, and then magic happens. What a gift it is to...

"Singing in a choir, you're trying to about five things at the same time, and sometimes you're not even doing it in the language you have spoken your entire life. Sometimes I had to just start with rhythm on one pitch and then build that step by step by step. In the process, I was always trying to teach voice. If the voice mechanism shuts down, that's where you get into problem...

“If you have opportunities to have them take over the work, you can engage them in a way with chaos circles. I love doing chaos circles when they’re teaching themselves the music. Sometimes you see students who are usually very shy really step up to the challenge of becoming leaders, You get to see students in a way that they don’t always present themselves if you can get them moving around and en...

“Middle school kids really are very concrete learners. Abstract thought isn’t there yet. Give them the ability to see ‘I’m not the only one having problems on page 10. I must be normal because everybody’s having problems on page 10.’ Or, if it is a kid who’s the only one who’s having a problem, let’s figure out what the problem is. Let the kids have some voice in helping problem-solve rehearsal is...

“Going into high school, I did everything possible to avoid the performing arts. My vice principal called me into the office and said, ‘you can’t have an open period. I’m gonig to put you in choir.’ Within weeks, it became a life-changing experience for me – I discovered a community, a way to express myself. I knew by the end of my junior year in high school that this is what I wanted to do.” - Br...

“My job is to make people love choral music as much as I do, and that’s a lot. I really love choral music. My job is to say ‘you should care about this.’ You might care about it because it’s ravishingly beautiful or because it has a story to tell you. Even if you’re not a person who relates to choral music, you can relate to stories. We’re going to weave some sort of through-line through this prog...