American Choral Directors Association
The mission of ACDA is to inspire excellence and nurture lifelong involvement in choral music for everyone through education, performance, composition and advocacy.
Choral settings of the African American spiritual were first sung by the fabled Fisk Jubilee Singers after slavery. Composers like Dett, Dawson, Hall Johnson, and Work, and more recently, Hogan, built on these beginnings, making impressively artful settings of these songs. We are faced with the question, “How shall we sing this music?” This session […]
Jacksonville FLThis session focuses on the collaboration between a conductor and a scholar in the preparation of a program of medieval choral music. We discuss the creation of historically informed performance materials of chant and medieval polyphony and demonstrate how primary source material can inform the performance of medieval music for small choral ensembles. This session […]
Cincinnati OH.As conductors, we are aware of the canon of historical composers whose works are worthy of remembrance and performance with our choirs. However, it can be challenging to find authentic pieces by these composers that are appropriate for smaller ensembles. Drawing upon recent and older publications and internet-based resources, this session will highlight little-known sacred […]
Cincinnati OH.The English are famous for their choral tradition. Yet, with the sixteenth-century reformations, the musically austere commonwealth in the seventeenth century, and relative lack of “home-grown” talent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one technically shouldn’t exist. This session will explore why and how the English sing, the origins of SATB scoring and the countertenor […]
Santa Barbara CA.This session will be a reading session of dynamic and engaging historical music (from medieval through the Romantic eras) available from the Choral Public Domain Library. The selected works have been edited by Elizabeth Schauerto eliminate errors and will include music in a variety of choral voicing for all ability levels and ages.
Santa Barbara CA.William Levi Dawson (1899–1990) was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century choral music. The son of a slave, he rose from humble beginnings in rural Alabama to become, at a relatively early age, the director of the Tuskegee Institute Choir. Dawson arranged many spirituals for his choir, including Ain-A That Good News, Ev’ry Time […]
Baltimore MD.
