Choir Fam Podcast

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Choir Fam Podcast

Dean Luethi & Matthew Myers

154 episodes

5 days ago

“Burnout is when you reach a point where there is no mystery in the music making anymore and you’re just redoing what you’ve always done. You’re reheating it. Self-exploration should be the goal of every musician. The idea of staying connected to sound through listening and really fantasizing is essential. You have to believe there’s magic in the room, and then magic happens. What a gift it is to share music with other people in that room at that time.” GRAMMY-nominated conductor James Jorda...

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Performing Arts

Music Interviews

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“Burnout is when you reach a point where there is no mystery in the music making anymore and you’re just redoing what you’ve always done. You’re reheating it. Self-exploration should be the goal of every musician. The idea of staying connected to sound through listening and really fantasizing is essential. You have to believe there’s magic in the room, and then magic happens. What a gift it is to share music with other people in that room at that time.” GRAMMY-nominated conductor James Jorda...

Show more...

Performing Arts

Music Interviews

Episodes (20/154)

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 142 - Imagination and Self-Exploration in Music Making - James Jordan

“Burnout is when you reach a point where there is no mystery in the music making anymore and you’re just redoing what you’ve always done. You’re reheating it. Self-exploration should be the goal of every musician. The idea of staying connected to sound through listening and really fantasizing is essential. You have to believe there’s magic in the room, and then magic happens. What a gift it is to share music with other people in that room at that time.” GRAMMY-nominated conductor James Jorda...

5 days ago

47 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 141 - Developing Efficiency in Choral Rehearsals - Richard Zielinski

"Singing in a choir, you're trying to about five things at the same time, and sometimes you're not even doing it in the language you have spoken your entire life. Sometimes I had to just start with rhythm on one pitch and then build that step by step by step. In the process, I was always trying to teach voice. If the voice mechanism shuts down, that's where you get into problems and they stop engaging. You have to let people in rehearsals make mistakes, especially early on. It's so important....

2 weeks ago

1 hour 2 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 140 - Providing Mountaintop Experiences Through Choral Festivals - Jenny Bent

“If you have opportunities to have them take over the work, you can engage them in a way with chaos circles. I love doing chaos circles when they’re teaching themselves the music. Sometimes you see students who are usually very shy really step up to the challenge of becoming leaders, You get to see students in a way that they don’t always present themselves if you can get them moving around and engaging the brain that way.” Dr. Jenny Bent is Professor of Music and Director of Choral and Voca...

3 weeks ago

49 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 139 - Musical Magic in Middle School - Gretchen Harrison

“Middle school kids really are very concrete learners. Abstract thought isn’t there yet. Give them the ability to see ‘I’m not the only one having problems on page 10. I must be normal because everybody’s having problems on page 10.’ Or, if it is a kid who’s the only one who’s having a problem, let’s figure out what the problem is. Let the kids have some voice in helping problem-solve rehearsal issues. The teacher is the expert, but that doesn’t mean that you know everything. Sometimes a kid ...

1 month ago

53 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 138 - Composing a Living - Dale Trumbore & Brandon Elliott

“Going into high school, I did everything possible to avoid the performing arts. My vice principal called me into the office and said, ‘you can’t have an open period. I’m gonig to put you in choir.’ Within weeks, it became a life-changing experience for me – I discovered a community, a way to express myself. I knew by the end of my junior year in high school that this is what I wanted to do.” - Brandon Elliott “If you are coming as a conductor to composing, you already have a resource that a...

1 month ago

55 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 137 - Connecting with Audiences Through Choral Storytelling - Joshua Habermann

“My job is to make people love choral music as much as I do, and that’s a lot. I really love choral music. My job is to say ‘you should care about this.’ You might care about it because it’s ravishingly beautiful or because it has a story to tell you. Even if you’re not a person who relates to choral music, you can relate to stories. We’re going to weave some sort of through-line through this program that tells you something about life that we hope resonates with you whether you’re a musician...

2 months ago

47 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 136 - Sharing Musical Value in Community Partnerships - Alex Gartner

“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 choir has on various spheres of influences. How do you translate your value to intersect with what t...

2 months ago

47 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 135 - Leading All Students to a Positive Choral Experience - Philip Brown

“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 a good experience with this. Now, they've got to buy in a little bit. They've got to own their piece of it. You can't do ...

2 months ago

50 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 134 - Unlocking Creativity by Arranging Popular Music - Garrett Breeze

“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 a song and figuring out how to put them together. It's almost like doing a puzzle. It unlocks some of ...

2 months ago

51 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 133 - Exploring and Celebrating Latin American Choral Music - Ryan Fellman

“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 change the meaning. I'd like to keep working at repairing the positionality of Spanish in academic places.” Dr. R...

3 months ago

44 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 132 - Expanding Singers' Tone Color Palette - Francis Cathlina

“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 color that section of the music. They’re able to access the full breadth of their vocal powers in the...

3 months ago

45 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 131 - Building Community Through Music in Worship - Jennaya Robison

"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 conductors find how to use that voice so that they don't need to manipulate things. Dr. Jennaya Robison is the Artistic D...

4 months ago

48 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 130 - Expanding the Choral Sound with Contemporary Music - Rob Dietz

“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 do some good for the world in a time where we really need it." Rob Dietz is a multi award-winni...

4 months ago

57 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 129 - Making a Difference Through Choral Music - Joy Hirokawa

“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 you impacting the world?’” Dr. Joy Hirokawa is the Artistic/Executive Director of the Mosaic Youth Ch...

4 months ago

48 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 128 - Building Emotional Intelligence Through Choral Singing - Jeremy Brown

“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 my students aren't in the right mental headspace, then the music won't come.” Jeremy Brown is serving his third ...

5 months ago

47 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 127 - Reconsidering Pedagogy to Support Neurodivergent Singers - Peter Allen Haley

“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 anticipate what you're going to say and quickly implement that into their own music making.” Dr. Peter Haley serves as...

5 months ago

43 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 126 - Balancing the Needs of Our Singers and Our Institutions - Kristina Ploeger-Hekmatpanah

“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 students and the entertaining needs of the audiences. Looking for literature for all of those reasons of...

6 months ago

47 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Season 5 Wrap-Up

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, Sydney Guillaume Measure Me, Sky, Elaine Hagenberg Messiah, George Frideric Handel Las Amarillas, S...

6 months ago

15 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 125 - Inspiring Choral Skills Through International Competition - Mark Anthony Carpio

“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 join competitions would just be a product of years of singing with a choir.” Mark Anthony Carpio is...

6 months ago

51 minutes

Choir Fam Podcast

Ep. 124 - Exploring the Fusion of Choral and Commercial Music - MaryAnne Muglia

“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 the rehearsal process, and I know what’s hard and what might be easier to grab onto.” Mary...

6 months ago

46 minutes