Are you looking for help with choirs that talk too much? Are you thinking that maybe, as a director, you are talking too much? Do you feel like you’re running out of ways to inspire a choir? Do you need ideas for recruiting singers into your program? Would you like information on dealing with hard-to-blend voices?

I can answer yes to all of these questions, and I know that hundreds of other conductors can too, because I’ve been reading questions and responses to topics just like these at some great websites. ACDA (www.acdaonline.org), MENC (Music Educators National Conference www.menc.org) and ChoralNet (www.choralnet.org) each host wonderful forums for seeking and sharing help, advice, and ideas. If you have never visited them before, or if it’s been a while, I highly recommend that you try them out.

On the ACDA site, click on “Forums.” Here you’ll find a general discussion forum, a repertoire and standards forum, and job postings. The advantage of the ACDA site is that you can post very specific questions (i.e. “looking for good 2-part music about trees” or “what are the best kind of chairs to buy for a choir to use?”) and get knowledgeable advice from choral colleagues.

ChoralNet is a huge site, with many different resources. The “Forum” section has a ChoralChat forum as well as open forums about choral music in Europe, Latin America and Italy. At the links below “Forums,” such as the ones labeled “Repertoire,” “Rehearsal Techniques” and “Technology,” there are categories and subcategories of information, in which tens or hundreds of responses to particular topics have been compiled. It’s a great place to look for help on almost anything related to choir conducting.

At the MENC site click on “networks,” then “chorus” and “open forum.” For elementary choir conductors, this site has some advantages, because it is more exclusively frequented by directors of school-aged singers and less by adult and community/professional conductors. The questions and responses are complete enough in the browsing list so that it’s easy to find the topics that are of interest to you. Another nice feature is that MENC has official website Mentors (school teachers and university faculty) who volunteer responses to many of the questions. When you need a little inspiration, it’s helpful to read what seasoned teachers and expert teachers of teachers have to say.

Choral conductors and teachers often work in isolation. Usually, you are the only music teacher at your school or certainly the only choir conductor. Even if you’re part of a team, there is often little time for talking about day-to-day challenges and rehearsal strategies. With the long stretches between workshops and conventions, the forums on the ACDA, MENC, and ChoralNet websites allow professionals to share resources, and they reassure us that we face many of the same struggles and are working through many of the same issues. Both new and more experienced teachers can find and share great information on rehearsal techniques, programming and repertoire, diction, vocal production, touring, and hundreds of other topics. And, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, just submit a question!

Greetings from Kentlake High School in Kent , Washington .  I'm the new R&S Chair for Women's Choirs and I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce myself to you.  I'd like to share with you one small but significant experience here at Kentlake created new excitement in my job and has helped me to become a better musician. This brief article could be called, "How I came to love my women's choirs."  Although I've been in music education since 1970, I've only been teaching at the high school level for eleven years.  I have no idea if the experience I'm about to describe will resonate with any of you, whether it's typical or atypical.  This is simply one person's journey.

I taught with my husband, who is a band director, in the little town of Cashmere , somewhere off the highway between Leavenworth and Wenatchee .  We raised our two boys there, and they were both in our music classes and band throughout their school years.  I had two choirs at Cashmere High School . There was my concert choir of course, and then I also had a girls choir made up of mostly freshman.  I was in the fairly typical position of having too many girls and not enough boys, which meant that there was a limit on the number of female voices I could have in concert choir.  Although I did my best with my girls choir, I was more emotionally invested in my mixed choir because there I found more capable singers who could perform more challenging music.

I found myself in a similar situation when I began at Kentlake six years ago. There weren't enough boys to have a balanced younger mixed choir, so those few were absorbed into concert choir. But at the beginning of my third year at KL I found myself with a large of sophomore girls who had an unusually mature sound.  By early Spring I was confident enough of their abilities that I decided to send in an audition tape to the All Northwest screening committee, even though this was a non-auditioned group. The following fall we called ourselves "The Kentlake Select Women's Ensemble," and I had the privilege of spending two more years with this remarkable group of young singers.

That's how I came to love my women's choirs.  It was a situation that was unlooked for and unexpected, a situation I simply found myself in the middle of, and I just got on board and went for the ride.  This experience changed my attitude about working with treble voices, gave me a new concept of tone for this age group, and surprised me with the level at which they are capable of performing.

I'd like to hear from you about your joys and challenges in working with your women's choirs. Please tell me about workshops or festivals that you're aware of that could be promoted in the UNISON, as well as your ideas about what kinds of events you'd like to see in the future that could support women's choirs. My E-mail address is priscilla.baldock@kent.k12.wa.us.  I'm looking forward to your feedback.

Priscilla Baldock leads a session at the 2004 Summer Institute

In the early nineties, you may recall being swept up in the Riverdance craze. I remember watching the Riverdance video for the first time, and being transported not by the dance, but by the choral sounds of the ensemble that took the stage. After some brief research, I began to understand the beauty of this choral music and the unique sound that they offered. The choir, Anuna, became a defining voice that I would soon use in my choral classroom. I have since then purchased every Anuna album and have fit the study of this choir into my yearly curriculum. I found Anuna’s website and began corresponding with Anuna’s founder and composer, Michael McGlynn. This interview took place in March of this year. His insight and creativity has opened my eyes to the study of choral music in another culture.
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R: Was Anuna created to perform your compositions, or did you begin composing after the ensemble was founded?

MM: Anuna was created specifically out of a love for medieval and renaissance music, which is not performed very often in Ireland. Initially when I set it up I didn’t do any of my own pieces, but as time went on I discovered that people were actually reacting more strongly to my own arrangements. It was set up for a different reason, but has become that vehicle over time. My first compositions date from the early 1980s but I only really began choral composition in the early 90s.

R: What did you see as the primary function of Anuna?

MM: It didn’t really have a function… there was a void, there still is a void. We are still the only choir in Ireland that performs the material that we do and perform in the way that we do. I hoped that by galvanizing and rejuvenating Irish choral music it would sort of form an exciting and new area for choral music in this country, but in fact all we are after 16 years of existence is still a unique performing entity with really little or no connection with our peers.

R: How was Anuna selected to perform with Riverdance, and what was the experience like?

MM: It was because of the work that I had done as a composer and the creation of this unusual and very pure sound that Anuna make which is still in my opinion quite unique (I’ve never heard it anywhere else)… that we created by performing material, which expand two thousand years. We were the automatic selection for a choral group really, and we had worked with Bill Whelan (Riverdance composer) in the past. The experience was interesting in that Anuna became a household name in Ireland as a result of it and we were on a Grammy award winning record and video. To be honest it’s made me comfortable financially to a certain extent so that at least I was able to buy a house. I would not have been able to do that otherwise as a professional musician in Ireland. There just were no opportunities. It was a negative and a positive thing… I found it very difficult to deal with the commercialization of the music. I also found it very difficult to watch Anuna be submitted into this overall generic Celtic/Irish creation which it became and is today. While I was very proud of our contribution at the beginning, I would say no if the choice came along again. When we were offered it by Michael Flatley for his own show, I’m afraid I turned it down… there were great financial incentives to do so.

R: I have noticed the sacred influence in some of your compositions. What are the criteria for choosing a sacred text that pairs with Gaelic so well?

MM: You bring up “Salve Rex Gloriae,” which is actually a bad example. That is an original Irish text from the eleventh century which has overtones of medieval mythology about it… The religious influence is automatic of course because what happens particularly… is the intrusion of Christianity into this extraordinary natural and beautiful world of the text… The chorus section goes “Danu dai” and Danu is the goddess of the hunt.
When Christianity came to Ireland rather than coming and wipe out the ancient forms that were there it became absorbed into them. The mythology has a Christian element at a later stage but it still has very strong roots in Paganism and I have to say Irish people themselves pride themselves in having a very strong Pagan element.

R: Why have you combined multiple languages in compositions? What can this teach performers when studying your compositions?

MM: I combine languages because my primary subject in actually English and I studied Middle English in great depth and I speak Irish and French and smatterings of various other languages. I also am a great admirer of medieval music and one of the key forms in the early part of the second millennium was a poly-textual motet where you would have different texts, sometimes in different languages running simultaneously. They illuminate truth so very often the text, for example in “Wind on Sea” and “Invocation.” Where you’ve got this idea of something being said in the background which throws light on what’s being said otherwise or adds to it. As long as the diction’s good, one should be able to hear all the words of everything quite clearly. I suppose it doesn’t say much about my compositions, it says much more about my interest in literature and the fact that to me, if the literature has no merit than I can’t set it freely, to be honest.

R: Where do you find texts?

MM: My primary degree is English, and I have studied so many different sources. It’s a case of going out and slogging and looking at the area that you’re interested in and finding as much as conceivably possible as you can about the writers and their background because particularly if they’re modern writers you’ve got to be able to react to the idea behind the text and there’s nothing I dislike more than hearing settings of text where it’s very obvious that the composer is writing a completely separate piece to the one that the poet actually would react to positively. It’s why I rarely set W.B. Yates because his texts sing and why should I feel that I was good enough to come in and reset in a musical form something which already is exquisitely beautiful and musical.

R: Your use of chromatic movement and jazz/cluster chords with sacred text is not common in today’s choral music. What influences you to write such compositions and do you see this as a new trend in contemporary choral music?

MM: I actually am not aware at all of contemporary choral composition. I have no knowledge of what is going on at all in choral music. Ireland is an extremely chorally isolated country. While we do have choral festivals here, really people don’t talk about choirs. Everything is extremely on a very amateur level which I’m not criticizing; it’s just the way the structure works here. So basically, the only conversations I have about choral music are with people from other countries. Everyone has their own agenda and their own structure and their own fashion so I try to steer clear very strongly from them. What I do when I look at or hear choral pieces that I like is in essence they can influence me. For example, Lighetti's’ “Lux Aeterna,” one of the quintessential choral pieces of the twentieth century has had a huge influence on me and yet you can only hear that influence in only one piece, “Tenebrae III.” This idea of microtonal work invades a lot of my composition in that I am fundamentally aware that different vowel sounds and different placements in the voice can actually flatten or sharpen or brighten a piece. I am very careful when I word-paint and the use of Latin (i.e. “Pater Noster”) makes everything so much easier. It’s such a mellifluous and sweet language. English is a very ugly language to set… I find it quite hard. I’m sure a lot of composers would agree.

R: When a choral group begins studying your compositions, what would be the best way to approach the piece from the first rehearsal?

MM: My compositions would be quite stark. Very often, many of the versions of my pieces, which I have to say I love hearing because people have very interesting takes on my work; very often I don’t agree with it at all but so what… that’s what music is about. It’s wonderful to see somebody’s interpretation of something, and the fact that it contradicts my perception can be a very good thing, but I can only tell you what I would do in relation to Anuna. I always take the false musicality out of it… by false musicality I mean that very often choirs have these devices that they use where they swell like “this” and they phrase like “this.” What I try and do is actually get the singers to sing musically full-stop and that their diction is correct and when I have their diction correct and I have the musical phrases actually into a shape that the singers understand (remember—we’ve no conductor) the responsibility becomes entirely up to the choir when they perform. Then, at that stage, I may put some musical things in. My view would be that as people become more familiar and are musical (as most people are… doesn’t matter what people say… they are musical and they can hear when something is hideous), they will correct it themselves. If I want something specific, I’ll ask for it. But like many things in life, even when you specifically ask for them, very often the choir will deliver it differently.

R: Do you feel it is important to promote choral music to outside cultures?

MM: No I don’t. I think in this day and age where you can go on the Internet and you can find the kind of music that you like… I don’t see my role as promoting Celtic music. I see my role as promoting good choral singing and beautiful sounds that touch people. The Celtic thing is a moniker which is attached to what Anuna do simply because we’re located in Ireland and we use a certain amount of traditional music in what we do. If you look through my own compositions you’ll find that they are decidedly un-Celtic, and if anything they are very romantic in feel almost like Debussy or Tavener (well, not that romantic), and my religious works are very much related to spiritual music and have a very strong medieval flavor. So, the promotion and propagation of Celtic music and “Irishness” is not something that I see as my job at all.

R: Many of your compositions have a transcendental feel to them. How are your pieces best performed (setting, staging, etc.)?

MM: I fundamentally disagree that choirs should move on stage unless it has a direct bearing on what the piece is about. When we look at what Anuna do, we always look at what its relevance is. If you’re going to put them standing there, why are they there? What are they doing? How does that relate to the music? The nature of the performance very much affects the listener. To achieve a fairly strong transcendental affect, I think it does help to have some of the pieces appropriately with movement.

R: What vocal techniques are vital when performing your compositions?

MM: I find a lot of the debate on what choirs should be doing and how they should be singing and where they should be standing… here’s what I do with Anuna. Number one, we rehearse once a week. Number two, we have no conductor, and so the choir has to listen to each other as opposed to watching somebody conducting. Number three, I sit beside people, particularly if they’re new, and I correct them individually on every single thing they do wrong. If they won’t sing out, well, if they’re going to be nervous singing beside me, then they’re going to be four-times more nervous on stage in front of an audience. Number four, we don’t do any warm-ups of any sort. People come in and they have to focus the moment they walk in the door. If they want to be in Anuna, they’ll come in focused and ready to go. Remember, Anuna is made up of amateur singers, not professionals. The quality of the singers would be no better or no worse than many of the half-decent choirs over in the USA, and there are many choirs that are far better than Anuna vocally, but the key with Anuna is to make the people that are strong blend with the people that have smaller voices which maybe have a different color or an emotive feel to them. That’s the technique that we use.

R: What can we look forward to from you as a composer and from Anuna?

MM: I have just finished a cycle of four commissions. The next one I’m doing is an orchestral piece called “Aurora” which is for full orchestra. As for my other compositions, the major thing coming up is going to be a new Anuna album. It will be a major departure from what’s gone on before. It will hopefully take away the Celtic moniker from us. Anuna is touring a lot, currently in South America. When they come back, they go to Belgium and Finland, Germany and Spain, and finally back to America in the new year.

This July, attend Washington’s ACDA reading session at the University of Puget Sound, where Michael has given me special permission to present selections from his repertoire. It will be an opportunity to explore and experience new movements in choral music, as an American publisher does not yet carry his pieces. Other information can be found at www.anuna.ie