Annual Messiah Sing Post!

Here it is, your annual Messiah Sings post for 2013! Late as usual. But there are still quite a lot of sings coming up! If I missed any that you know of, leave a comment!

Upcoming:

Fri. 12/6: Messiah Sing to benefit Project Bread. 7:30 pm. At All Saints Parish, Brookline. Tickets $10/$5 stu&sen. Scores provided, or bring your own. (You can still make it!)

Sun. 12/8: Nashoba Valley Chorale annual Messiah Sing. 3:00 pm. At the Congregational Church of Littleton. More info here.

Sun. 12/8: Sudbury Memorial Congregational Church Annual Messiah Sing. 3:00 pm. At Sudbury Memorial Congregational Church, Sudbury. More info here.

Sun. 12/8: Carter Memorial United Methodist Church Messiah Sing. 3 pm. At the Carter Memorial United Methodist Church, Needham. Scores available, or bring your own. More info here.

Sun. 12/8: JP Concerts Messiah Sing-a-long. 7:00 pm. At St. John's Episcopal Church, Jamaica Plain. Suggested donation $10. Scores provided, or bring your own. More info here.

Tues. 12/10: Brandeis University Messiah Sing. 4 pm. At the Shapiro Campus Center Atrium, Brandeis University. Free admission. Scores available, or bring your own. More info here.
 
Wed. 12/11: Cathedral Church of St. Paul Annual Messiah Sing. 12:15 pm. At the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, downtown Boston. More info here.

Fri. 12/13: Masterworks Chorale annual Messiah Sing. 8:00 pm. At Cary Hall, Lexington. Suggested donation $12. Scored provided, or bring your own. More info here.

Fri. 12/13: Roxbury Latin School Concert and Messiah Sing. 7:30 pm. At the Roxbury Latin School, West Roxbury. Free admission. Scores provided, or bring your own. More info here.

Sat. 12/14: Masterworks Chorale annual Messiah Sing. 8:00 pm. At Cary Hall, Lexington. Suggested donation $12. Scored provided, or bring your own. More info here.

Sun. 12/15: Assabet Valley Mastersingers Messiah Sing. 3:30 pm. At St. Mark's School in Southborough. Scores available, or bring your own. More info here.

Sun. 12/15: St. Peter's Church in Weston Messiah Sing. 4:00 pm. At St. Peter's Church, Weston. Free admission. Limited scores available, or bring your own. More info here.

Sun. 12/22: Harvard Unitarian Church Messiah Sing. 5:00 pm. At the Harvard Unitarian Church in Harvard, MA. More info here.

Sun. 12/22: Belmont Open Sings Messiah Sing. 7:30 pm. At All Saint's Church, Belmont. Tickets $10.  Scores provided, or bring your own. More info here.  

Passed:

Thurs. 12/5: Annual Dunster House Messiah Sing. 8:00 pm. At Dunster House, Harvard. More info here. 


Merry Messiah season to everyone!

Cantilena concert this Sunday!

Cantilena's winter concert is this coming Sunday, and I hope you all come!

I am very proud of the pieces on this concert - we are (of course!) doing Britten's A Ceremony of Carols in honor of his 100th birthday year. We're also doing Paul Csonka's Concierto de Navidad, a very cool piece that I was introduced to by our awesome harpist, Barbara Poeschl-Edrich. The pieces are very different, and compliment each other nicely, and we have worked very hard on both!

The concert will be this Sunday at 4 pm. We'll be performing at First Parish Arlington, 630 Mass Ave, Arlington, MA. And there will of course be a delicious reception afterwards!

Hope to see you there!

Friday cat post!

It's been a while since we've had a Friday cat post, but my mother sent along this article last week, and I thought I would share. I think you will find it very helpful in planning your next vacation!

Anthology new music concerts this weekend!

Anthology, my women's vocal quartet, is starting our fall season with a concert of world premieres, written particularly for us by six members of the Boston Composers' Coalition! Join us this weekend, in person or online, to experience six unique pieces of new music by Heather Gilligan, PoChun Wang, Brett Abigana, Andrew Smith, Ramon Castillo and Justin Casinghino! (To pique your interest, I will say that one of these pieces is something I would definitely like to program again with a women's choir; and another is one of the cleverest pieces of new music I have ever sung.)

Friday, October 4th at 8 pm (7:30 pm pre-concert reception) at
The Green Room (thegreenroomsomerville.com)
62 Bow Street, Somerville, MA
Come and join us in this intimate new performance space for a salon-style evening of new music, conversation and refreshments. Be warned: we expect this concert to sell out, so get there early!

Saturday, October 5th at 8 pm at
Killian Hall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA

Both concerts are free and open to all. Details concerning both concerts and directions to venues can all be found at: www.bostoncomposers.org
If you can't attend the concert in person, you can also visit the website during concert time to be connected to a live stream of each event. 

 

We have worked our tails off on this concert, and there is so much variety and invention on the program that there is sure to be something for everyone! Hope to see you this weekend, either in person or in cyberspace!

Sing with Cantilena!

My women's chorus Cantilena is singing Britten's Ceremony of Carols this semester! We're pairing that with Concierto de Navidad by Paul Csonka, an Austrian-Cuban-American 20th-century composer (he had to keep running away from fascists.)

Auditions are tonight, and also next week. Come to First Parish Arlington at 7:30 pm either tonight or 9/23 and join an awesome, friendly group for some great singing!

Who wouldn't want to sing this?

Cats have vocal prowess!

Apparently some cats employ what is called a "soliciting purr" to get food from owners.

I wish Samson would talk to those cats. He just meow, meow, meows when he wants to nag me about something!

Monday link

Check out 10 tips for better practicing from NPR! (And conductors, don't neglect it!)

In non-musical news, check out these awesome photos a photographer dad took of his daughters.

Monday link

Happy September, and happy back-to-school!

Now that everything gets busy, it's very important to remember to get enough sleep! Especially because it turns out sleep is an essential part of practicing! (But not the only essential part, don't get too excited.)

And also, have a charming class syllabus. Hat-tip to Anney Barrett (whose new rehearsal and performance space is opening in Somerville, for all you Boston-area musicians! Check out the Green Room.)

Monday link

Great article about Marin Alsop! I find it so refreshing that she acknowledges that it's somewhat taboo to talk about sexism when it comes to conductors, but she's willing to do it anyways. Hat-tip to my mother.

And if things weren't hard enough, there is a new study out on the importance of appearance for musicians. I don't think most of the singers or conductors I know would find this particularly shocking; it's kind of cute (i.e. naive) that the reporters for both the articles I read on this study remark that it's "surprising." After all, there's a lot of research done on how appearance and attractiveness benefit people across the employment spectrum. One would assume it would matter even more in an artistic and performance-based job! Doesn't mean we have to like it, though. Hat-tip to my father.

Job for beginner conductors!

Chorus pro Musica has a fantastic reputation as one of the best amateur choruses in Boston, and they are looking for a conducting intern! This would be a great job for a college student, or anyone who would like to break into choral conducting.

Monday link

A great article about the long-term effects making an opera together had on a second-grade class.

Monday links

I came across a couple of articles today, both from Northwestern:

I'm a Trans Composer. What the hell does that mean?

Northwestern U. Student Jeopardizes Degree by Refusing to Perform Whitman

(The latter link is sadly only completely available if you are a subscriber to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, but I'd be happy to send anyone the full text via e-mail. Very interesting!)

Monday link

To all the kids out there, whether you self-identify as creative or artistic or weird, or haven't yet labelled yourself...we're waiting for your stuff!

And to anyone out there who misses Opera Boston - a similar type of bird might be rising from the ashes.

Summer lectures voting results

This past Wednesday, I finished up a series of lectures I was giving at Lasell Village. I taught eight classes on the works of Benjamin Britten, and eight classes on the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. At the end of each class, I had everyone vote for their favorite work - it's a nice way of having a final discussion, and it's always interesting to me to see what people go for.

In the Britten class, the votes fell out as follows:

Peter Grimes won with six votes.
The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and the War Requiem tied with three votes each.
The Third String Quartet came next, with two votes.
And Curlew River and Sacred and Profane got one vote each.

For the Gilbert and Sullivan class:

The Gondoliers narrowly beat out The Mikado, with HMS Pinafore coming in third. Yeomen of the Guard got two votes, while Patience, Iolanthe, and Trial By Jury each got one.

(I'm happy to share my syllabi with anyone who is interested!)

Friday cat post!

It turns out that cats ALSO like watching cat videos! New levels of meta.

Another great summer sing with Cantilena, and another repertoire list!

This past Monday Cantilena hosted our second summer sing! The theme was "classics of women's choral repertoire" (that is, "whatever the conductor feels like") and it was just as fun as the first one! For those who are interested, here is the repertoire list! (The repertoire list for the first sing is here.)

• Britten – "Old Abram Brown" from Friday Afternoons
• Lotti – Vere Languores Nostros
• Haydn, M. – Laudate Pueri Dominum
• Mendelssohn – "Lift Thine Eyes" from Elijah
• Brahms – "Benedictus" from the Missa Canonica
• Brahms – Ave Maria
• Kodaly – Evening Song
• Elgar – The Snow
• Morley – Though Philomela
• Weelkes – The Nightingale
• Weelkes – Come, Sirrah, Jack, Ho!
• Casals – Nigra Sum
• Rachmaninoff’s Six Choruses for Women's Voices
• Munn – "The Stove" from The Muse, the Stove, and the Willow Plate 

Thanks to everyone who came! I am already thinking about next year's summer sings!

Winner of the book giveaway!

I'm happy to announce that (thanks to Mrs. Glosser's Math Goodies Custom Random Number Generator) we have a winner of last week's giveaway! Kirsten, you'll be getting a copy of Stacy Horn's Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing with Others in the mail!

Monday links

A handful of links today from various corners of the web.



My cousin sent me this trailer, which looks FANTASTIC. And it's playing right now in Kendall Square!

I got inundated last week with people sending me this link about how choir singers synchronize their heartbeats. So I pass it on to you!

Did you know? Choral Arts New England has a concert calendar and an online newsletter, both packed with information.

Via a friend on Facebook, read all about composers and their maladies! (They should mention, however, that Fauré also suffered from increasing deafness during his last two decades.)

And while doing some programming research, I found this wonderful website about Latin American choral composers!

Friday cat post!

The Amazing Acro-Cats (a 13-cat stunt troupe) is coming to Somerville on 7/24 and 7/25! You should get your tickets. Click on the link for a video of what you might see these trained cats doing.

And for your daily dose of cute, if you don't mind a dirty song (audio is NSFW) then check out this talented geeky singer-songwriter singing an unintentional duet with a kitten.

Great summer sing w/ Cantilena - repertoire list

So, last Monday night I hosted my first summer sing with Cantilena, and it went very well! I was really impressed with the level of reading ability among all the folks who showed up. The repertoire got increasingly more difficult throughout the sing, but we got through absolutely everything I threw at them!

A summer sing with a women's chorus is of course different from most summer sings, because the repertoire was unfamiliar to everyone. In most summer sings with SATB groups, you can rely on most of the people in the room having already sung the Brahms Requiem or the Mozart Requiem or Vivaldi's Gloria at least once already. But there is no repertoire for women's chorus that is SO well known that I can rely on the majority of the group knowing it, with the possible exception of Britten's Ceremony of Carols, which is hardly appropriate for July. So everyone is really sight-reading!

Therefore I had to choose repertoire that I thought would be readable as well as interesting and fun! Here's what I came up with under the topic of French sacred music for women's choirs (I included links to the CPDL to some of them):

• Dufay's Gloria ad modum tibi
• Gounod's Messe brève no. 4 in C
• Delibes' Messe brève
• Massenet's Ave maris stella
• Caplet's "O Salutaris Hostia" from Messe a Trois Voix
• Fauré's Ave Maria
• Fauré's Ave verum corpus
• Franck's Alleluia (so fun! but long)
• Charpentier's Gaudia Virginis Mariae (also so fun! and short)

And I had copied, but we didn't have time for:

• Fauré's Tantum Ergo
• Franck's O Salutaris Hostia
• Saint-Saëns' Ave Maria

Remember, the next sing is this coming Monday at 7:30 pm! Come do some sight-singing with me!