Maybe you’ve seen the Kaiser Permanente truck roll by with the “Music Is Therapy” poster on the side. Personally, I think that’s pretty cool. I’ve heard the term “music therapy” used to describe…uh…what exactly? Thus began a journey to figure it out. (Thank goodness for the internet, do you remember when we did all our […]
How many times have you heard it during a Windward Choral Society “wacky warm-up” session…after Susie has us do something truly bizarre and/or silly, she smiles and insists there’s a “pedagogical” reason. Given that five-syllable words make my head hurt, I’ve let it slide. But not now. Time to find out what in the name […]
I have a particular fascination with books written around the turn of the 20th century. They’ve climbed out of the soup of “thee” and “thou” and “thine” into a more conversational style but still have an innocence that’s really refreshing. Yeah, the Clive Cusslers and Stephen Kings of the world are fantastic at their craft, […]
In 2009, Chorus America did an “impact study” with the lofty goal of showing the benefits of choral music in the community. You can read the entire thing at https://www.chorusamerica.org/system/files/resources/ImpactStudy09_Report.pdf, but be forewarned…it’s 28 pages of really small type and really large words and bucketloads of charts and graphs and such. Don’t worry, I’m your […]
Nothing to do with singing but perfect for a Friday. Enjoy. The really cool stuff starts right around the 1 minute mark. https://youtu.be/0HzFVGf9Dfg
Back in March, the Blogmeister mentioned the concept of the singer or musician as a small muscle athlete. http://dusty-beam.flywheelsites.com/2015/03/02/windward-notes-athletics-in-the-rehearsal-hall/. But what about the big muscles? We’re hauling big chunks of air in and out of ourselves and those big air bags are attached to our back and our chest and our shoulders and our opu. […]
When he was three, my nephew went to his first NCAA Division I hockey game. When I asked him how it was, his response was, “The man skates real fast and runs right into the fence”. It’s hard to imagine peeling back the layers of the game any further than that, getting down to its […]
Blasting off a concert with “Lord, I Know I’ve Been Changed” (insert booming applause noises here) set me to wondering about the hand-in-hand relationship between the gospel and blues musical styles and how they can so often be intertwined (and how awesome it can be when they are). A little research opened up some interesting […]
The “that’s cool” department and the “that’s silly” department have both asked for a little post-concert space in the blog. Great video from the former and I’ll apologize to the tenors for the latter ahead of time…um…then again, maybe I won’t. They ARE tenors after all. A Honda commercial where all of the sounds are […]
Pretty much anything that uses oxygen does it (sometimes for the worse, but we won’t talk about that): the energy of individuals combines when an experience is shared and that energy is compounded and boosts the individual’s energy which raises the energy level further. Lather, rinse and repeat until the entire mob is jacked up […]