Choir Fam Podcast

"One way for me to work through things like gun violence and civil rights issues, things I really struggle with, is to set it to music and build a community around it. I found that this really speaks to singers, which is healing and affirming for me. What's more therapeutic when you're struggling than having a community around you? We build that for each other. I can't write th...

"Working with the MTC Women’s Prison Glee Club was life-changing, taking women who had never been in a choir, teaching them about head voice, consonants, vowels, and diction and all the musical things that we talk about all the time in choir. We went down to the very basics and that was remarkable for us as conductors to see you have the ability to teach anybody if you learn how to sequence a...

“Transitions are key to all of the rehearsals that I run. We lose a lot of very valuable rehearsal time when we switch from one task to the next, whether they’re taking their music out or they start talking to a neighbor. Every time we switch tasks, there’s a ‘switch cost,’ which is the time it takes for our brain to transition from one experience to the next experience. I’ve developed transition...

“The work that we do as choral people matters. The art matters. The music is the engine that drives the experience for everybody. In community organizations, they yearn for high level artistry. They don’t want it to be a hobby. They want to be challenged and fulfilled. I want the experience for them to be fun, but I don’t want it to be ‘for fun.’ There’s no bench in a choir. Everyone is contributi...

“My predecessor is very, very well-known, an amazing choral director, and he’s still in the area. I’m trying to establish myself as the new director following such a well-loved choral director. My colleagues and he himself set me up really well for that. How do I establish myself as somebody who knows what they’re doing and wants to honor what’s important to the community? I’m adjusting to traditi...

"The most important advice I ever received is that you cannot call a piece 'done' until you have sung through every part, beginning to end, and 90% of the time changed at least one thing because of that sing-through. I think I'm a good music reader, but I'm going to falter at the things that most people would on a first read. If I'm singing through my music and I stru...

"What I do with the high school choirs is important. I always tell them, 'I'm really just trying to convince you to do what you already know you can do, to give yourself to it, to create this big whole beautiful experience for yourselves. Then your audience is privileged to get to see what you can do.' That's the inner calling. It's using conducting, singing, and teac...

“I tell composers to collaborate with a poet who takes their craft as seriously as they take their craft. It’s a very rare creative who can do both well. What most often happens is a really good composer isn’t a very good poet, or a very good poet is a mediocre composer. One side of that creative process will lose. That’s why I love to collaborate, because you bring in a separate creative mind who...

"Secondary trauma is when you experience trauma second-hand. The trauma might not have happened to you specifically, but somebody shares with you their firsthand trauma and it impacts you emotionally, maybe physically. We don’t realize that we are very compassionate, empathic people, and we sometimes take it on without meaning to. It can impact us. I don’t think I can think of a teacher who’s...

"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...