UPDATE: The Angel City Chorale was eliminated in the semifinal round of America's Got Talent. It sang Bruce Springsteen's 9/11 anthem "The Rising" in their final performance, which aired on Sept. 11.
In early 20th-century Chicago, the intersection of classical and gospel church traditions gave birth to the modern gospel chorus movement. This history has made Chicago the gospel choir capital of the world—and continues to have an impact on ensemble singing today.
Each month, Chorus America profiles one of our members in our Meet A Member interview series. To mark the season of giving, we often change things up a little bit for December by speaking with Chorus America donors. This year, we spoke to Hussein Janmohamed and Joan Szymko, the two composers donating compositions for Chorus America’s 2018 Commission Consortiums.
Jean Davidson does not have the background of a typical choral administrator. The Los Angeles Master Chorale (LAMC) president and CEO took the job—her first in the choral community—after working in theater, contemporary dance, and instrumental music, where she served as the founding managing director of the Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma.
There's a groundbreaking musical powered entirely by the human voice. In Transit is Broadway’s first a cappella musical, boasting a creative team that includes Frozen songwriter Kristen Anderson-Lopez and contemporary a cappella guru Deke Sharon. The show’s run is an exciting development for proponents of vocal music, and a prime showcase for actors with unique a cappella singing talents like James Snyder.
Music is an emotional medium, yet we often spend rehearsal time in our choirs focused on notes, rhythms, and precision, rarely addressing the meaning of the music, says arranger and producer Deke Sharon. In the new book The Heart of Vocal Harmony: Emotional Expression in Group Singing, Sharon puts the process of delivering an emotionally compelling performance front and center.
Every conductor, singer or voice teacher needs a few good vocal hacks. No, we’re not talking mediocre singers; we’re borrowing from the tech world where Merriam-Webster defines a hack as a “creative solution to a computer hardware or programming problem or limitation.”
To achieve patron engagement and loyalty, you need a core strategy by which to evaluate, understand, and serve your audiences. In this webinar, Matt Lehrman of Audience Avenue, LLC presents a framework that empowers a “whole-organization approach” to building, sorting, and targeting the different audiences your chorus wants to reach. He’ll focus on how to drive deep loyalty, how to inspire return attendance, how to pursue awareness and participation from entirely new population segments, and how to deliver extraordinary experiences that really matter
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One choral leader described setting a concert attire policy as “somewhere near getting a root canal.” Ouch! We asked choruses—and the choral apparel companies that clothe them—to give us their best advice for making the process as pain-free as possible.
Whether your chorus has 10 singers or 110, what those singers wear matters. The overall look should complement, not distract from, the music and communicate a certain level of seriousness, or as one choral conductor quipped, “not like you just walked in off the street.”
