Acclaimed librettist/lyricist Charles Anthony Silvestri has worked with composers from all over the world, most notably Eric Whitacre, Ola Gjeilo, Dan Forrest, Andrea Ramsey, and Costas Dafnis. In this session, Silvestri reveals the secrets of a lyricist’s craft, describes his process when working for composers, shares insights from a career on both sides of the […]
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Alzheimer’s Stories: Music and Memory
Composer Robert S. Cohen and Librettist Herschel Garfein explore the creation of “Alzheimer’s Stories,” published by C.F. Peters, which is a featured work at the 2019 ACDA National Conference. The session will explore the collaborative process that led to the creation of the work and how music has been shown to help restore memory in […]
Getting America Singing Again: Bringing Song into Community
For a brief, remarkable period during the early part of the twentieth century, singing truly functioned as America’s pastime, bringing communities together through song. The purpose of this session is to present a historical context for how involving all people in singing should be a standard that we aspire to as a professional organization, and […]
A Choral Nest-Building Blueprint: Raising Singers and Lifelong Musicians
Do you wonder why your singers leave your choir? Do you want to strengthen your current and future membership? Do you want to help your current singers persist in singing in choirs throughout their lifetime? This session will explore the psychological and sociological constructs involved in why singers continue to sing. We will delve into […]
Introducing the Center for Congregational Song
This session will include an introduction to the new resources and programs available through the Center for Congregational Song,which launched in October 2017. While we navigate the resources and programs, we will explore examples of a wide variety of new congregational song being written, congregational song-leading techniques, and talk about the importance of the congregation’s […]
Dissecting Vocal Timbre: A Proposal for Categorizing and Notating Sounds for Choirs
This session proposes a set of categories for choral timbre and a notation based on the spectrograph shapes of extended vocal techniques, thus creating an intuitive, scientifically derived, and analytically replicable set of timbres for choral compositions. Specifically, we will look at familiar and discernible types of ensemble singing such as Broadway belting, the Balkan […]
