I went to one of the myriad of Messiah ’sing-ins’ a couple of years back and enjoyed blasting through many of the familiar choruses. If you’d like to listen to / sing along with a good performance, visit NPR’s Handel’s ‘Messiah’ from Philadelphia.
On the other hand, I came away that evening thinking that there could have […]
Instrumentalists, please don’t shoot me! but a recent choralnet blog post concerning choral vs orchestral conductors got me thinking along similar lines: the seeming divide between vocalists vs instrumentalists. As I see it, the broad stereotype seems to go like this:
Instrumentalists think of vocalists as non-musicians, amateurs, a lower breed (’singers’ they say with a knowing nod).
Vocalists tend to […]
I was first exposed to the concept of ‘complaints choirs’ last week when I stumbled upon a video from the Helsinki Complaints Choir on youtube. Today I came across complaintschoir.org : home of the worldwide complaints choir movement. While on the surface I find this mildly amusing, there is also something about it that bothers me.
Perhaps […]
One thing I love about the choral world is that fresh talent is much more easily embraced than in the instrumental world. I think part of that comes from the fact that the voice is rooted in certain musical realities that are impossible for it to escape. You can only walk so far away from […]
It is not for a composer to say if she/he is great or no, performers are the ones who will decide if his/her music will thrive and survive over time. I find it amusing though, when I hear people complain that there are no Bachs or Mozarts or Beethovens anymore. In one sense, of course […]
Literacy in the world of letters implies that you can both read and write sentences. In the world of music, however, a person is considered literate if they can read music and (maybe) understand some of the theory of music (the equivalent of sentence diagramming); the writing of music never enters the equation. Isn’t that […]