Choir Fam Podcast

“You’re not going to ask a bunch of choir directors to donate to your organization — you’re going to have to go find other people who probably don’t have the type of experience with choir that choral leaders do. It’s about trying to translate not just your own personal love of choir but the reason that your choir exists, what it does for its community and its participants, the impact that your cho...

“It's hard to focus on anything educationally if certain basic needs aren't being met, so you're trying to navigate and be proactive as much as possible. I have students who have their own needs and things they're going through that are influencing the classroom. Every year, every group, it's a different dynamic. Every student in this group deserves the opportunity to have...

“I was one of those people that had some biases against pop music. Being in show choirs and seeing the ways that the songs were transformed and arranged really opened my eyes to different styles of music and changed my perspective. I no longer view popular music as being all that different from classical music or film scores. There's just something about arranging: taking all these pieces of...

“The Spanish language is not treated with the attention and nuance that we often do for many of the languages used for singing auditions. There’s this myth that Americans can't make certain sounds, but in other rehearsals, we work really hard at intense French and German sounds. A lot of composers who aren't familiar with the language set the text in ways that don't make sense and c...

“I ask them to sing with maximum efficiency, accessing their singer’s formant, and from there, we’ll ask for specific sounds. Sometimes conductors get stuck asking them to blend, to listen. When we do that, it’s like giving them an 8-pack of Crayola and asking them to color. Instead, we start the rehearsal with a 64-pack and then throughout the rehearsal we might pick out the light blue #2 to colo...

"In my third year of teaching, I started to have vocal problems. I was taking voice lessons. I was singing professionally. It was feeling great. Suddenly my voice was gone, and I couldn't get it back. I took a leave of absence to get some speech language therapy. That's why I'm so passionate about using our voices in the choral ensemble in an effective way and having us as cond...

“I love the way that contemporary a cappella engages singers who might not necessarily see themselves as ‘choral singers’ to be able to sing together and maybe discover a love of more traditional choral music. For me, it’s all about engaging more singers. Group singing is such a beautiful community, and I’ve seen the ways it can really change lives, create beautiful spaces for self-expression, and...

“We were all asking ourselves, ‘what can we do to counter this, what’s happening in the world? How can I help my singers understand and navigate what is happening in our country right now?’ I made this huge shift in my thinking about what choral music should be and why we should be doing it. It's not just ‘what are you singing and is it gorgeous?’ but ‘how are you making a difference? How are...

“My mantra for my teaching is: I want to create good humans while also creating good musicians. I tell every ensemble that on the first day of school. What they care about is 'Does Mr. Brown see me? Does he value me? Does he care for me?' Then they'll start singing. I care more about the human heart than I care about the perfection of the music. Yes, I care about the music, but if m...

“Start with the way that you structure your rehearsal, your classroom, your feedback. In terms of feedback, we talk about not giving people more than three pieces of information to work on. Working memory is affected by ADHD in particular. ‘Here's what you're doing well, here's what you can improve on, here's how you can improve it.’ That structure helps with their ability to a...

“We’re often put in positions that make us uncomfortable with the inner struggle of how to keep our job and have our program recognized enough to get support versus how to carry out our true mission with students. If I’m trying to continue to fall in love with the choral art, I think the way to do that is looking for literature that will balance the soul-searching and academic needs of the student...

Thank you for listening to our show this season!! Here are the favorite choral pieces from our guests in the fifth season: Christmas Oratorio, Johann Sebastian Bach Mass in B Minor, Johann Sebastian Bach (x2) Trois Chansons Bretonnes, Henk Badings The Sweetheart of the Sun, Eric William Barnum Ein Deutsches Requiem, Johannes Brahms The Music Makers , Edward Elgar The Ground, Ola Gjeilo Kalinda, Sy...

“More competitions are being organized, and it has become a way for these conductors and choirs to work on their skills. By joining these competitions, the rate of their progress accelerated. People join choirs for different reasons. For most of us, we started only because we loved singing, because we found a place where we can share our voice with friends with the same interest. This desire to jo...

“We had 10 sopranos, 4 altos, 2 tenors, and 1 bass, and they were all volunteers. We were spending hours trying to learn this music that we didn’t have the numbers for, so I ended up writing almost 100 church arrangements, and I made the voice leading very stepwise. Being that close to the music made me a better writer because I’m not just writing for ensembles I don’t hear regularly. I’m there in...

“We ended up forming a new string orchestra at the high school, and I led every rehearsal and conducted every concert. I remember the very first day. I looked at my teacher and said, ‘how do you start them? Do I breathe?’ I tried something, and it didn’t work. Then I did the sniff, and everyone came in. Now I teach conducting, and what I want to give the students is a sandbox where they can make m...

“Everything changed for the gay choral movement because they had twins: music and mission. They weren’t just there for the music, and they weren’t just there for the mission. I’ve been feeding my twins every day, and I feed them equally. Audiences that are interested in just music for music making are dying out. There are a lot more reasons to get them in: many concerts can reach into the communit...

"I start every morning at the junior high, and we co-teach together. It's great for alignment in the program, for familiarity with the students and getting to know them and hopefully continuing in choir. Our students see that we collaborate. I like that they can see that because it shows them how to go about relationships. People need be modeled how to treat each other and work together...

“I think during my formative years, shying away from my true self – my authentic self – that's definitely shaped how I approach being in front of choirs, using choir as a platform to really encourage kids to be themselves. I think there's a vulnerability to singing where it really is an avenue to accessing the truest parts of ourselves, and so that's kind of my life mission now that...

“You never know what anybody's potential is. I think about that now as a teacher, that we are expecting 17-, 18-year-olds to know what they want to do for the rest of their lives. It’s so early in your life to make those decisions, and so much can change during those really formative years. I want to help them to be the best version of themselves in the field and achieve the goals that they w...

“Sometimes my students ask me if I worry about the future of choral music with advanced technology, AI, but I really am not concerned at all. The way that I see it, the act of making music with each other, the need to connect with each other – I don't see that going away anytime soon. To connect through honest, authentic communication that is not a digital platform – people want that. I'...

“I think the hardest thing in the world is to write easy music that still is eloquent. A piece relies on strength of idea and not strength of technique or difficulty. That underlying idea is so rich with potential and can be developed in so many beautiful ways within a 3-minute work or a 70-minute work. The pieces I'm the most proud of are the pieces where I've gotten down to the simples...

“I want students to function in a studio recording session and a live performance, which are very, very different worlds. I want them to be able to do not just jazz, not just classical, not just gospel, but everything so that they can be hired to sing backgrounds for Beyoncé one day and the next day be singing with Andrea Bocelli on tour. I try to give them the most well-rounded experience I can.”...

“Students will often refer to voice lessons, to choir rehearsal, as therapy. I felt that there was something to that. I wanted to make the connection between individual therapy and voice lessons and group therapy and the choral rehearsal. What is it about the choral organism that becomes a space that can be therapeutic? I found a lot of commonalities in group and individual counseling and what we...

“One of the things we know about the brain is that information that is acquired through problem solving is more likely to be retained. I might start rehearsal by saying 'take out the piece in D major,' 'let's start in the climactic moment of the Brahms,' 'take out the piece where fire is used as a metaphor for passion.' You start with a problem, so you're al...

“You never know someone else’s story. You never know what the experience of a concert or hearing a piece is to somebody. You don’t know how that affects them. So much of my music and why I do what I do is to facilitate these moments of connection between choristers, to give autonomy to choristers to feel like co-composers of my music themselves each time they’re performing the work. I always tend...