Renowned conductor of the Crossing Donald Nally joins me this week to think through the programming question from his perspective as both a director who has worn the “professor” hat, as well as the being the conductor of a high level professional ensemble. Donald shares his general philosophy and practice for creating a program that serves as its own piece of art.

This episode gave me a lot to chew on for choosing repertoire for choirs at all levels. You will learn a lot from this conversation too, from discussion about music with political implications, programming for storytelling, considerations for sacred music in non sacred choral contexts, and much more. The Crossing also has a new album called “Motion Studies” that serves as an interesting case study for the depth and breadth of what our art form is capable of communicating.

Tune in, and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Then, weigh in yourself on Facebook in the Choralosophers group or over on choralosophy.substack.com

For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and FB!

Donald Nally was the John W. Beattie Chair in Music and director of choral organizations at Northwestern University. He collaborates with creative artists, leading orchestras, and art museums to make new works for choir that address social and environmental issues. He has commissioned over 180 works and, with his ensemble The Crossing, has produced 30 recordings. Donald and The Crossing have been nominated for nine Grammy awards, winning Best Choral Performance in 2018,  2019, and 2023. He has held distinguished tenures as chorus master for Lyric Opera of Chicago, Welsh National Opera, Opera Philadelphia, the Chicago Bach Project, and for many seasons at the Spoleto Festival in Italy.

Donald’s collaborations include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Park Avenue Armory, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Beth Morrison Projects, Lincoln Center, Mostly Mozart, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust, the Barnes Foundation, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNow series, Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the National Gallery, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the American Composers Orchestra, Klockriketeatern at the Finnish National Opera, the Institute for Advanced Study, Big Ears Festival, and the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana, where The Crossing holds an annual residency.

MOTION STUDIES– Released on April 5th
OCHRE– Available on July 12th

In addition to his work with The Crossing, Donald has been visiting resident artist at the Park Avenue Armory, music director of David Lang’s 1000-voice Crowd Out at Millennium Park in Chicago, Lang’s 1000-voice Mile Long Opera on the High Line in Manhattan, and chorus master for the New York Philharmonic for world premieres of Julia Wolfe and David Lang.  His 60-chapter series Rising w/ The Crossing, a response to the 2020 pandemic, gained national attention and was featured in The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR’s Performance Today; it has been archived by The Library of Congress as a cultural artifact as an “important part of this collection and the historical record.”

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I am joined this week by Bass soloist Michal Dawson Connor, who was caught in the middle of this controversy. He tells his side of this frustrating story and pulls no punches. A story that ends, for now, with the church’s “Racial Justice Advisory Board” being in control of what music is or is not allowed in the church, rather than the Music Ministry. When we in choral music preach diversity and inclusion, is this really what we mean?

This topic, in a broader sense, has been explored MANY times on this show going all the way back to some of the first episodes. Namely, what is the role of African American Spirituals and Gospel music in the telling of our American story, and in what ways can the cultural sharing through music lead to unity, healing and reconciliation? What does it mean to be diverse and inclusive? Can these things be achieved while drawing strict lines around categories, and gatekeeping? There seems to be a consensus in music education on these questions amongst scholars of the art form. Experts like André Thomas, Anthony Trecek King, Marques Garrett, Brandon Boyd, and even philosophers and race scholars like Anika Prather, Sheena Mason and Teodros Kiros just to name a small few have appeared on this show to speak on these important philosophical ideas. “Tough Conversations” play list linked above and embedded below.

Tune in, and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Then, weigh in yourself on Facebook in the Choralosophers group or over on choralosophy.substack.com.

For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and FB!

Michal Dawson Connor is an accomplished performer and composer of choral, chamber, and solo vocal works, with a particular emphasis on Slave songs created before the Civil War. He was born in Jamestown, New York, and is a proud alumnus of Carnegie-Mellon University and L’Ecole Hindemith in Vevey, Switzerland – where he studied voice with Blake Stern and Helen Boatwright. Championing American composers has always been a high priority for him, and Mr. Connor has concertized extensively throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, specializing in the rich vocal repertoire of Charles Ives, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, and many others.

Mr. Connor’s Broadway credits include featured performances in the Tony-Award winning productions of “RAGTIME” and “SHOWBOAT”, as well as starring roles in productions of “THE MOST HAPPY FELLA”, “BIG RIVER”, and “PORGY AND BESS”. In addition to soloing on multiple occasions for President Ronald Reagan, he’s immensely proud of performing for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Reverend Billy Graham, and Elizabeth Dole. Mr. Connor is a published author of “THE SLAVE LETTERS” currently available on Amazon.com. On network television, he was a guest star on “FRIENDS”, as well as several appearances on the Emmy-Award winning show “EXTREME MAKEOVER: HOME EDITION” and “THE SURPRISE GARDENER”.

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Cognitive scientist, Mark Changizi joins me this week for a fascinating exploration into the hardware and software that allows humans to understand, interpret and make sense out of music. In his book “Harnessed,” he makes the case that human speech has been very specifically “designed” to harness the sounds of nature, sounds we’ve evolved over millions of years to readily understand. Long before humans evolved, mammals have learned to interpret the sounds of nature to understand both threats and opportunities. Our speech—regardless of language—is very clearly based on the sounds of nature.

Even more fascinating, Changizi shows that music itself is based on natural sounds. Music—seemingly one of the most human of inventions—is literally built on sounds and patterns of sound that have existed since the beginning of time.

Tune in, and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Then, weigh in yourself on Facebook in the Choralosophers group or over on choralosophy.substack.com.

For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and FB!

MARK CHANGIZI is a theorist aiming to grasp the ultimate foundations underlying why we think, feel and see as we do. His research focuses on “why” questions, and he has made important discoveries such as on why we see in color, why we see illusions, why we have forward-facing eyes, why the brain is structured as it is, why animals have as many limbs and fingers as they do, why the dictionary is organized as it is, why fingers get pruney when wet, where emotional expressions came from, and how we acquired writing, language and music.

He attended the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, and then went on to the University of Virginia for a degree in physics and mathematics, and to the University of Maryland for a PhD in math. In 2002 he won a prestigious Sloan-Swartz Fellowship in Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech, and in 2007 he became an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 2010 he took the post of Director of Human Cognition at a new research institute called 2ai Labs, and also co-founded VINO Optics which builds proprietary vein-enhancing glasses for medical personnel. He consults out of his Human Factory Lab.

He has more than three dozen scientific journal articles, covered in thousands of newspaper and magazine articles. He regularly keynotes at both scientific events and at art galleries and museums, and has appeared on many television shows, including regular appearances on Discovery Channel’s Head Games and National Geographic’s Brain Games. TED has featured him in three areas of his research, namely illusions, color vision, and pruney fingers. He curated an exhibition and co-authored a (fourth) book — ON THE ORIGIN OF ART (2016), by Steven Pinker, Geoffrey Miller, Brian Boyd & Mark Changizi — at MONA museum in Tasmania in 2016 illustrating his “nature-harnessing” theory on the origins of art and language.

He has written three other books on his research, THE BRAIN FROM 25,000 FEET (2003), THE VISION rEVOLUTION (2009) and HARNESSED: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (2011). He is working on his fifth non-fiction book, this one on emotions and facial expressions, called EXPRESSLY HUMAN: Decoding the Language of Emotions. He has also written a novel, called HUMAN 3.0, about what’s next, after humans, extending his nature-harnessing principles into the future.

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Katerina first exploded onto the choral scene in 2019 in a burst of flame so to speak. Her piece “Fire” from the song cycle entitled “Elements” was performed by the Vancouver Youth Choir at ACDA that year. I was in the room. The piece, and the performance from the group pinned me to the back of my chair. When it was over, I wasn’t sure how to describe what I had just heard. For the rest of 2019, the piece exploded, being performed by choirs everywhere. And then, a year later, the choir world closed for business during the pandemic.

Katerina joins me in this Oxford Series episode to discuss the very strange trajectory that resulted for the start of her career. Typically, if a composer has a big, high profile success, it is immediately followed up by more opportunities to create. But, in many ways that moment was frozen in time for her. We discuss the fear of being a “one hit wonder,” as well as her path toward a more wholistic fulfilling career as a full time composer with a rich catalogue. The varying soundscapes she creates is remarkable!

We also banter about “Western Music” notation, and how it can and should evolve through innovation, and expanding use of symbol and sound palettes that were not available to musicians with notation in previous generations.

Tune in, and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Then, weigh in yourself on Facebook in the Choralosophers group or over on choralosophy.substack.com.

For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and FB!

Composer, improviser, and vocalist Katerina Gimon‘s uniquely dynamic, poignant, and eclectic compositional style has earned her a reputation as a distinct voice in contemporary Canadian composition and beyond. Her music has been described as “sheer radiance” (Campbell River Mirror), “imbued…with human emotion” (San Diego Story), and capable of taking listeners on a “fascinating journey of textural discovery” (Ludwig Van), earning her several honours including multiple SOCAN Awards (2022, 2021, 2016), nominations for Western Canadian Composer of the Year (2023, 2021), and a Barbara Pentland Award for Outstanding Composition (2022).

        In her music, Katerina draws influence from a myriad of places — from the Ukrainian folk music of her heritage to indie rock, as well as from her roots as a songwriter. Her compositions are performed widely across Canada, the United States, and internationally, with notable performances at Carnegie Hall, Berliner Philharmonie, and the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Recent commissions include new music for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Youth Choir, National Youth Orchestra of Canada, and re:Naissance Opera. Katerina is the composer-in-residence for Myriad Ensemble and is based in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada*.

 In addition to her composing work, Katerina is also a founding member (vocalist, electronics, co-composer) of dynamic new music and AR/VR collective Chroma Mixed Media

 alongside multi-media artists David Storen and Brian Topp. Excited by the ever-evolving landscape of technology in today’s society, Chroma endeavours to explore new avenues and intersections for artistic expression by combining various art forms and new technologies to explore new possibilities and challenge audience expectations.

        Katerina holds a Master of Music in Composition from the University of British Columbia (’17) and an Honours Bachelor of Music degree in Composition and Improvisation from Wilfrid Laurier University (’15). When she isn’t making music, Katerina enjoys playing board games, puzzling, adventuring outdoors, and relaxing with her partner and their two cats.

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In this return of “Car Thoughts” I will take you through a short explanation of how I conceive of individual singing assessments as part of a wholistic choral music curriculum. Towards the end, you will even hear some thoughts from my daughter Clara who just completed the 9th grade version of my class. I ask her to reflect on her pre-test back in October all the way to her 2nd semester final that she had done the day before. We will also go over the pedagogical and philosophical reasons that I believe that it is our obligation to insist that every individual student deserves individual feedback on their progress. Being allowed to hide in the group causes equity issues.

Don’t forget to support this show, because it dies without you! Listen as much as you can! Use the Choralosophy code at Graphitepublishing, EndeavorMusicPublishing, SRF and MyMusicFolders, and if you REALLY find this show useful, I hope you will help me crack over 200 PAID supporters either on Patreon or Substack. Just search Choralosophy on either platform to get signed up and keep this show going into the future. 

In this short-ish episode, I will focus on the singing alone part of that National Standard #1. We will cover the singing in small groups standard in a future episode. 

Tune in, and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Then, weigh in yourself on Facebook in the Choralosophers group or over on choralosophy.substack.com.

For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and FB!

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Dr. Steven Hankle directs the choirs at University of Dayton in Ohio. Steven caught my attention recently with a very vulnerable post on FB in which he was both celebrating his recent promotion to tenured professor and expressing gratitude for the people that helped him “beat the odds” as an African male growing up in the South Side of Chicago.

So, I asked Steven to be even more vulnerable and join me to explore this story further. How can music, and ensemble create a bridge a person’s life that helps them climb a mountain? In this episode, we will hear what it was like for Steven growing up, and why being a tenured professor in Choral Music is such a significant departure from what young Steven envisioned for his life.

We also discuss the socio economic issues facing many inner city kids, the misleading nature of racial language, the power of choral music as an agent for social change, and the way Steven’s story his impacted his teaching philosophy.

Tune in, and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Then, weigh in yourself on Facebook in the Choralosophers group or over on choralosophy.substack.com.

For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and FB!

Dr. Steven Hankle is the Associate Professor of Choral Music and Music Education at the University of Dayton, where he directs the University Chorale and Bella Voce. Also, he teaches choral conducting and choral methods. Dr. Hankle also serves as choral faculty at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, where he directs the staff choir, alumni choir and vocal ensemble. As the Music Director of the Alumni Choir, Dr. Hankle has directed a live Blue Lake Radio broadcast performance of John Rutter’s Gloria. He also conducted Johannes Brahms’s Liebeslieder Walze Op. 52 during Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp Summer Festival. Hankle is the Chorus Director for the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra Chorus, where he prepared the chorus to perform with the Dayton Philharmonic for the world premiere of Steven Winteregg’s Expressions, Brahms’s Requiem, Mozart’s Missa Breves, and more. An active clinician and adjudicator, he has worked with choirs in California, Florida, Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kenya, Africa, and Tijuana, Mexico.

Dr. Hankle is an active member of the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA), where he serves on the state board in Ohio, Chorus America, National Association for Music Education (NAfME), National Collegiate Conductor Organization (NCCO), where he serves on the National Board, and Ohio Music Education Association (OMEA). Dr. Hankle has presented his research at the Florida Music Education Association (FMEA), Arizona Music Education Association (AMEA), NAfME, and ACDA conferences. His primary area of interest is developing choral music programs in urban secondary public schools, student engagement through movement, developing sight-reading skills through repertoire in the choral rehearsal, leadership in the choral classroom and wellness for choral conductors to prevent teacher burnout.

A native of Chicago, Steven Hankle received undergraduate and masters degrees in music education and choral conducting from San Francisco State University and his Ph.D. in choral conducting and music education from Florida State University. Prior to his appointment at the University of Dayton, he served as choral music and music education faculty at Penn State University. He successfully developed a new choral music program at Mission High School in San Francisco.

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In this episode, I look back to 18 to try and find which ideas presented there are still true for me, and on which points my view has shifted or evolved. Many points made in the original episode were wildly misinterpreted and taken out of context. Other ideas have stood the test of time.

In the last five years, the conversations with colleagues have been incredibly illuminating, educational and humbling for me. It has forced me to consider the difference between circumstance and pedagogy. What is the “best” pedagogy for building advanced, independent, fluent musicians in the choral or instrumental classroom? Are there any right and wrong answers?

Short answer: YES. There are right and wrong answers. We know more about the way the brain acquires language fluency than we did when many of our music education methods books were written, and definitely more than when many of industry norms were formed. Nuanced answer: kids, people and circumstances are INCREDIBLY complex. We don’t teach prototypical humans in labs.

Tune in, and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Then, weigh in yourself on Facebook in the Choralosophers group or over on choralosophy.substack.com.

For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and FB!

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This book has powerful insights and implications for teachers in addition to parents. I, of course, have my own thoughts related to how the advent of “the phone based childhood” as Dr. Haidt calls it, has impacted my own children. But in this episode, I will try to keep the focus on how this book can help teachers truly “meet students where they are.”

I see a lot of posts from colleagues who are very hard on themselves for what seems to be declining student motivation, low levels of participation and other negative and noticeable trends. Of course, the teacher does hold a power to motivate for good or ill, but we can’t do it for them. I highly recommend this episode as an introduction to this cutting edge research and analysis. There are skeptics of course, which we will discuss as well.

From the summary of the book: After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Tune in, and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Then, weigh in yourself on Facebook in the Choralosophers group or over on choralosophy.substack.com.

For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and FB!

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Bruce is a high school choral educator who teaches in a district in which a very small percentage of elementary students are presented with a choral music experience. Across the country, we have a vast inequity in access to choral music making opportunities at the Elementary level. Not only disparities in access to high level choral experiences, but also access to basic, school choirs.

When we don’t have choral students, we don’t have choral parents. When we don’t have choral parents, we don’t have administrators that see it as important. This is the danger of not tending the roots. We have developed a top down perspective on what we are concerned with.

We are concerned with equity and issues of representation at the top. “Who makes all state choir?” “Who’s music is being programmed?” These are fine things to ask. But, this like noticing blemishes on a leaf and continuously pruning without bothering to check the tree under the earth.

We also discuss the problem of our professional organizations being run by mostly Collegiate directors. These directors may be very supportive of elementary music, but may be separated from the consequences. You can have an inequitable system, and still have it look just fine at the top.

Tune in, and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Then, weigh in yourself on Facebook in the Choralosophers group or over on choralosophy.substack.com.

For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and FB!

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Bruce Rockwell is the choir director at College Park High School in Pleasant Hill, California. He has taught choir, piano and guitar at College Park for 15 years, instrumental music at the San Francisco Waldorf schools, and theory and musicianship at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s pre-college division. Mr. Rockwell received is MM in Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and his BA in Music from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

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In this episode Timothy Mount, a Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook University, joins me to discuss his very strongly worded article from the early 1980’s and in what ways he still agrees and disagrees with himself forty years ago. We discuss the thorny issue of balancing the choir’s need for balance and timbre preferences against the vocal needs of the individual singer. One of the claims in Tim’s article was “forcing the female chest voice upwards is dangerous.” In the episode, we discuss this belief and whether or not it is out of date in 2024.

We also discuss the ways gendered language attached to voice parts, and the norms related to these terms has changed since the article was published. Recently, Tim tried to repost this article on the ACDA Facebook page in an attempt to try and discuss some of these changes of perspective, but it was taken down. I personally disagreed with a good number of things in Tim’s article, but I give him credit for being willing to discuss publicly how his views on a variety of these topics has changed over the course of his career. We can only move forward and grow when we can be intellectually flexible.

Tune in, and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Then, weigh in yourself on Facebook in the Choralosophers group or over on choralosophy.substack.com.

For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and FB!

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Timothy Mount, pianist, singer, and choral conductor, is Professor Emeritus of conducting at Stony Brook University, one of the leading graduate music programs in the country.  He conducted 9 commercial CD’s with professional choirs and orchestras in New York City and Moscow and 2 with the Stony Brook Camerata Singers.  Tim has guest conducted many choirs and for over 10 years was conductor of the professional chorus and orchestra at the San Luis Obispo Mozart Festival.  In the Spring of 2023, he guest conducted the distinguished Crane Chorus at SUNY Potsdam.

He published 5 articles concerning choral music and a video, Refine Your Conducting Technique, available from Santa Barbara Music. His article, Preparing for the First Rehearsal appeared in The Choral Journal in the summer of 2023. He guest conducted the renowned Crane Chorus in the spring of 2023.

A bass-baritone, Tim sang with virtually every professional choir in New York City.  He is the pianist for the Trillium Chamber Players.

• Car Thoughts